Processes are an integral part of your business. They define the way your products are delivered to your markets, using the functions that are available.

According to market research agency Gartner, four of the most typical use-cases of Business Process Management (BPM) are transforming your business, setting up a continuous process improvement program, building a process-based application and redesigning the IT for an easier service-oriented architecture (SOA) implementation. SAP designed a starter kit around these four use-cases to help you find an approach for BPM applications in your company.



SAP BPMS provides the necessary tools and frameworks to transform this model into an executable business process. This generally takes the form of an application which automates the process by invoking functionality in the backend systems through web-based services, including process participants for human tasks in the process, enforcing business policies in the form of company-wide rules and converting data between the business systems that are involved in the process.

The current third iteration of this technology provides a complete tool kit to create such processes based on worldwide standards, such as XML, BPMN and SOAP. It goes much further than merely linking together actions, as it also affords other features to monitor ongoing and past processes and offers an unlimited choice of user interfaces, by exposing all process functionalities as specifically designed APIs.