{{Unreferenced, date=June 2008
Many computer systems are available in the commercial
marketplace
A marketplace or market place is a location where people regularly gather for the purchase and sale of provisions, livestock, and other goods. In different parts of the world, a marketplace may be described as a ''souk'' (from the Arabic), '' ...
that address the various aspects of
Business Process Management
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business ...
. Most address one specific set of functionality; for instance, some allow the processes to be mapped (see
Business Process Mapping
Business process mapping refers to activities involved in defining what a business entity does, who is responsible, to what standard a business process should be completed, and how the success of a business process can be determined.
The main pur ...
) and documented (such as Visio); others allow for
simulation
A simulation is the imitation of the operation of a real-world process or system over time. Simulations require the use of models; the model represents the key characteristics or behaviors of the selected system or process, whereas the ...
s to take place (such as ARIS). But most of these are very limited in their ability to address the full requirements of BPM.
Procedure
Very few systems provide for full
automation
Automation describes a wide range of technologies that reduce human intervention in processes, namely by predetermining decision criteria, subprocess relationships, and related actions, as well as embodying those predeterminations in machines ...
. These allow the users to define the process flow and then enter the business rules' that generate the complete working system, including the database and all application logic. They also provide full management facilities to manage the running of the processes (such as changing users when someone is off sick), as well as a complete history trail so that
activity-based costing
Activity-based costing (ABC) is a costing method that identifies activities in an organization and assigns the cost of each activity to all products and services according to the actual consumption by each. Therefore, this model assigns more i ...
analyses can take place. They also provide full statistical analyses ( P and R measures) that allow the automated process to be changed and improved.
These system differ from all traditional IT developments in that everything is time based. Traditional systems (often found as
Legacy system
In computing, a legacy system is an old method, technology, computer system, or application program, "of, relating to, or being a previous or outdated computer system", yet still in use. Often referencing a system as "legacy" means that it paved ...
s) are 'passive', in that they provide excellent functionality when specifically asked to do something - they will answer enquiries, process updates and produce reports. Active systems are driven by time - in what sequence must activities happen; when must tasks be completed and by when; what happens if work misses a deadline; how are parallel activities to be resynchronised. These facilities are all handled by true Automated Business Process systems.