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For companies operating in today's fast-changing, global marketplace, every day presents a completely new set of challenges, risks and potential rewards. Changing needs, advancing technology and market pressures combine to create ongoing, fundamentally new ways of doing business. Existing processes and methods have to be streamlined in such a way that business managers can adapt to the changing conditions.

It is not revolutionary to state that processes - specific, ordered steps and methods that run the different parts of any enterprise - are what drive business, and distinguish agile and forward-looking ones from companies that are flailing and foundering. However, most companies continue to look for new methods and new technology, which cost serious amounts of money, instead of looking at the way they manage and optimize existing practices. Business Process Management (BPM) software is an important tool for this.

First, some definitions
There are any number of formulas, equations and "bottom line numbers" that tell business owners if they are profitable or not. There are a few core ones, however, that help business owners and managers understand why they are profitable (or not). Two of the most helpful of these are Return On Investment (ROI) and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

ROI can be broken down for separate operating divisions and departments, although it is probably most common to hear the term applied to a "total" corporate financial calculation. For the purposes of this article, the ins and outs of calculating ROI - with various interest rates, amortization tables, investment considerations, inventory calculations and so forth - are not as important as understanding the general thrust of the term. ROI is crucial if businesses intend to survive and prosper, as it affects its total financial health and determines a firm's ability to raise new capital.

TCO, rather than being a single corporate figure, is applied to those aforementioned separate operating divisions and departments, primarily technology and other "hardware" areas. The TCO calculation is one that is made in regards to automobiles and building ownership, for example, as well as for the PCs in the office and the mainframes, networks and other elements of a firm's technology base. The calculation takes into account computer use, network costs, repair and maintenance, security costs and every other impact on the cost of the business technology.

How BPM helps
Business processes are sets of linked steps or actions that, taken as a whole, result in a particular, defined outcome, whether internal or external to the firm. Because documenting and automating business processes means working with language - describing what is done, why and how and when it is done, what people and/or systems actually do it, how well it is accomplished - businesses amass a great deal of information and informal processes that are described and handled by different people in different ways. When employees take this specialized and hard-to-communicate knowledge and experience with them when they leave, companies can be left in the lurch.

However, Information Age technology allows firms to document such informal business processes, even those that extend across departments and systems using multiple, unconnected resources. BPM software is one key to converting once-personal processes into efficient, responsive and teachable ones using industry-standard vocabularies. As a management discipline, then, BPM integrates people with the right content and the right applications in a process-centered, cross-functional manner that can be understood and explained in basic English. Jargon, remember, is an enemy of clarity in BPM as it is everywhere else.

Multiple bottom lines
BPM solutions give businesspeople the tools that help make their firms processes clear and understandable. TCO calculations will deal with the actual items and events involved in real-world workflow with specific equipment, thus reflecting reality rather than a projection or assumption. ROI figures will similarly communicate the effects of real decisions, investments and market results. BPM software provides the overall, real-time-based environment in which TCO- and ROI-related decisions will be based on timely data of the most comprehensive type.

Affecting both ROI and TCO, BPM software offers a range of important benefits. Companies can expect:

* enhanced corporate efficiency and new communications clarity;
* better support for personnel efforts that, in turn, support change and rapid innovation;
* increased customer retention by improving customer access to information;
* improved regulatory compliance, and lowered risk of manual processing errors;
* lower TCO from connecting users, content and applications in a unified BPM environment; and
* general efficiency improvements that drive increases in ROI.