Issue #187 | April 9, 2009 | by Andy Kowl

Have you heard of BPM, Business Process Management? If so, maybe you can answer this question.

Business Process Management is a _______________________ .

a) software system
b) discipline
c) conceptual approach
d) way of life
e) training or consulting someone is selling
f) none of the above

A number of people I met at the Info360 and On Demand conferences in Philly last week talked of BPM as if it was either the current or next big thing. The best I have been able to track is that BPM probably became 'a thing' in the product literature of Microsoft for their BizTalk Server suite of products. Other references place BPM's history as starting earlier than that.

It is more jargon; that is indisputable. Of course, being jargon does not make it bad.

It is a fact that some form of business process management is in every successful RFID implementation, by definition. Only the shrinking minority of companies who use RFID for mere compliance, not taking advantage of the tags they are paying for – only they are not using RFID to help manage the business process.

I think any budding controversy of whether RFID tracking of hard assets is an integral part of this process (?) will boil down to a matter of capitalization. Uppercase B-P-M and you have whatever it is you decided it is in your answer above.

By not using capital letters, you are still managing your business process, but spending less on consultants.

Apparently BPM is something real, because Forrester Research estimated (pre-Crash) that $2.7 billion will be spent in 2009 on "licenses and services" relating to it. It must be something, because one article claims "it" is ten years old.

Every single thing I have heard and read about BPM matches the reasons companies use RFID. Clearly, RFID is one tool the BPMers should be looking at carefully. A search of RFID Journal's website (and RFID Switchboard) finds not one single reference to BPM. Using its spelled-out name, the Journal has run a couple of stories mentioning it; but on that fine resource, only four or five mentions is nothing at all.

This is not meant as a bash on our friends at the Journal, only as a means of pointing out virtually nobody in the world of RFID is thinking about BPM, whereas RFID should be an essential tool in their approach.

One writer on the topic explains it this way. "The business process management discipline focuses on actual process design, automation, integration and monitoring to identify and make process improvements at the execution level. BPM or BPMS software allows organizations to take the processes they have modeled and optimize and actually automate and deploy them in practice. This includes integrating all dependent systems," according to Laura Mooney, Vice Pres. Corporate Communications at Metastorm, a software manufacturer.

"For business process analysis, the scale ranges from spreadsheet analysis to formal process improvement programs that asses process optimization across the full range," she continues, writing in "Best Practices in Business Process Management" from KM World magazine.

Looking throughout this publication of best practices, I saw not one overt reference to the tracking of hard assets. Every expert opinion I read seemed to be based on selling more efficient procedures in how your employees use their software.

And speaking of jargon, the articles in this publication, and the promotional material I gathered from companies offering BPM, is reeking of it: "roundtrip process automation," agility" and "wholesale transformation." Check it out:

". . . bear in mind the core goals of the BPM are process effectiveness, process transparency and process agility," Mike Lees, Senior DirectorBPM Marketing at Software AG writes in the same publication.

It's all about the software with BPM so far. As Mooney continues, "For business process management, the scale ranges from basic workflow to fully integrated cross-functional process automation of both human and system-based actions with real-time business activity monitoring and the ability to fine-tune processes as needed to achieve the desired results. . .

"BPM is about regaining control of your business and the means to make iterative and frequent improvements. Find resources that can ensure sustained success beyond the initial application."

Man, does that sound like everything we have been saying about RFID for these past five years, or what?!

But another sign the jargon is catching on and has excluded hard assets is this: when I mentioned BPM to a friend whose company is involved in it, he argued that anything other than software that helped employees store and access among themselves, or allowed archiving of meeting minutes, was not business process management.

Anybody looking to implement BPM best work with someone who knows about tracking actual items and people, not just software. Just as anybody selling RFID and related technologies needs to let the BPM consultant know how we can help them.

In fact, maybe the solutions we have been selling as RFID are really BPM all along. One without the other makes little sense.