Business process management
Business process management (BPM) is the discipline of identifying, documenting, analysing, improving, executing and monitoring a company's business processes as an ongoing management practice rather than a one-off project. It covers both the method — how processes are owned and improved — and the software that supports it.
What is business process management?
BPM is often described as a cycle: design or discover the process, model it, run it, monitor it, and improve it — then start again. BPM software ranges from modelling tools and process repositories to suites that execute and monitor processes.
Large organizations may run BPM with a dedicated team. Smaller companies can apply the same cycle with far less: a list of processes, owners, maps of the critical ones, and regular reviews.
Not to be confused with BPMN, which is only the notation, or business process outsourcing (BPO), which shares the letters but means handing processes to an outside provider.
Why it matters for SMEs
For example: a family-owned company practises “BPM light” without any BPM suite — a one-page process overview, a named owner per core process, maps and task cards for the critical steps, and a short monthly review per process.
For SMEs, the discipline matters more than the software; the software becomes useful once the discipline exists.
Business process management in the MentX approach
MentX captures how your company really works: the knowledge of your key people and the processes they run. We offer both a hands-on service approach — mapping your processes and capturing the knowledge behind them, from meetings, workshops and a guided intake — and our own personality-aware knowledge base, with full source attribution, in your own Knowledge Space. We build on the tools you already use and add best-practice solutions where they fit.
The approach covers the BPM cycle in four steps — capture knowledge, map your processes, capture your operations and operational excellence — building on the tools you already use.