Business process management (BPM) is a discipline in operations management in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. BPM focuses on improving corporate performance by managing business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business processes is BPM. Processes can be structured and repeatable or unstructured and variable.

As an approach, BPM sees processes as important assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and developed to announce and deliver value-added products and services to clients or customers. This approach closely resembles other total quality management or continuous improvement process methodologies. ISO 9000 promotes the process approach to managing an organization.

Successfully employing BPM usually involves the following:

Organizing around outcomes not tasks to ensure the proper focus is maintained

Correcting and improving processes before (potentially) automating them; otherwise all you’ve done is make the mess run faster

Establishing processes and assigning ownership lest the work and improvements simply drift away – and they will, as human nature takes over and the momentum peters out

Standardizing processes across the enterprise so they can be more readily understood and managed, errors reduced, and risks mitigated

Enabling continuous change so the improvements can be extended and propagated over time

Improving existing processes, rather than building radically new or “perfect” ones, because that can take so long as to erode or negate any gains achieved

Business Process Management Software (BPMS) is a process automation tool. It helps you map out your everyday processes to identify and eliminate bottlenecks, control your company’s costs, make your day-to-day processes as efficient as possible, and ensure the effectiveness of the people involved in your processes. A business process management solution to a company’s needs begins with the alignment of business goals with an eye toward creating value through process change initiatives. This alignment leads to a thorough understanding and design of representative processes typically following an industry standard framework

A BPM based foundation provides for complete lifecycle management of business processes, integration across technologies, and imbeds efficiency among people, processes, and technologies.

Commercial business process management tools tend to center on the automation of business processes, essentially moving them from manual pen-and-paper endeavors to effortless automated transactions. BPM software products track how business information is used and then maps the relevant business process and ensure that transactions are done accordingly. This effectively shows where data and process bottlenecks occur and highlights various deficiencies in business processes, including areas where resources are wasted, allowing managers streamline and optimize those processes.

There are three key types of BPMS:

Efficiency Monitors:Monitors every system of the enterprise for inefficiency in the processes by following it from start to finish. BPM program accurately pinpoints weakness and bottlenecks where customers might get frustrated and discontinue transactions and processes.

Workflow Software: Uses detailed maps of an existing processes and tries to streamline them by optimizing certain steps. BPM workflow software cannot suggest improvements to the process, only optimize it, so this software is only as good as the process itself.

Enterprise Application Integration Tools: A mixture of efficiency monitors, process and workflow management, EAI software is used to integrate legacy systems into new systems. This software can be used to map points for integrating old and new systems, optimizing their information-gathering characteristics and increasing the efficiency of system communications.