The IBM BPM Suite: Making a Positive Impact on Business
by Amy Larsen DeCarlo

In these uncertain economic times, businesses’ very survival depends on their ability to turn on a dime as market conditions change. Costs are soaring, profit margins are tight, and organizations are facing a slew of rivals in a volatile world market. These factors are pushing organizations to reassess their priorities, rethink business processes, and embrace change to become adaptive and flexible companies with a distinct competitive advantage.

In the current turbulent economy, organizations must translate operational improvements quickly and effectively by adapting processes to create bottom line benefits. To do so, companies need a holistic suite of business process management (BPM) tools that can help them evolve to meet shifting requirements. BPM tools need to do much more than simply automate process change; they should provide the basis for the kind of collaboration that is essential for continuous process optimization, which enables companies to respond rapidly to shifting market dynamics.

Although many vendors offer BPM products to help companies automate processes, these tools too often focus on the narrower value available from business process management and overlook the more collaborative aspects of continuous process optimization; similarly, many fail to enable the more dynamic and flexible processes that can rapidly adapt to changing business conditions. IBM is taking a different approach, investing in BPM offerings that deliver the full range of BPM business value, from modeling and simulating processes, to rapidly deploying and changing them, to continuously monitoring and improving operations.

At the IBM IMPACT 2008 Smart SOA conference in April, IBM took the wraps off its Business Process Management Suite, which taps SOA-enabled products from different IBM business units to deliver a complete BPM solution. The IBM BPM Suite takes a roles-based approach to providing the range of capabilities needed, including modeling and simulation, deployment and process adaptation, and process monitoring and analytics. These capabilities enable optimization over the entire process life cycle, making business operations more flexible and dynamic. The IBM BPM Suite will be available later this quarter in two different Starter Sets, which are packaged offerings designed to address key customer scenarios. All products in the IBM BPM Suite have been individually enhanced in the latest release.

The IBM BPM Suite is complemented by a range of extended value offerings, including the newly launched WebSphere Business Events solution, which enables companies to isolate causal relationships that impact operational performance. Users can establish event patterns in non-technical language using a codeless, graphical authoring tool. With the new solution, business users can find patterns in seemingly unrelated event flows and make correlations to improve efficiencies and take action to automate tasks and alter business processes.

IBM also offers pre-built industry models and best practices that use open standards-based business process classification frameworks that enable companies to compare their own practices to those used by other organizations in their industry.

With the economy in a state of flux, companies need all the help they can get to drive better margins and become more agile organizations. The IBM BPM Suite provides all the BPM components a business needs to meet changes head-on.

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