Business Process Management is a set of tools and services that support human and application interaction with business processes. BPM suites automate manual processes by routing tasks through departments and applications. These routings are rule and action-based, and are defined in a set of formulas. Actions can be automatically triggered, without an underlying rule requiring additional information; therefore, the process can be continuous and manual processes can be avoided.

Organizations use BPM systems to improve the effectiveness of their core operations. BPM specifically coordinates interactions between systems, business processes, and human interaction. It automates the routing of activities and tasks to employees, taking away non-value adding activities, such as routine decisions, data, and form transfer etc., and instead, provides users with tailored lists of task. With today’s tight integration of process definitions and underlying applications, changes in the definition can be deployed and communicated virtually immediately.

Additionally, BPM can also add value to a company requiring procedures to be created and published because it offers compliance management. Companies can use it to meet the US Sarbanes Oxley Act (SOX) and International Standards Organization (ISO) requirements. It can opening up a range of functions such as process (quantitative) analysis, and optimization. Thus, by implementing BPM, companies are able to orchestrate and leverage cross-functional business processes that are used over multiple systems, divisions, people, and partners.

First let's define the core element, a business process. A business process is an aggregation of operations performed by people and software systems containing the information used in the process, along with the applicable business rules.

Execution of Business Processes:
The execution of a business process achieves a business objective. The people and systems may be inside the boundaries of a company, but often times are in multiple enterprises needing to collaborate to achieve their business objectives. These processes also include business rules that may be documented policies and procedures, as well as the undocumented 'how we really do things' rules that exist in most enterprises.

A comprehensive Business Process Management platform provides an organization with the ability to collectively define their business processes, deploy those processes as applications accessible via the Web that are integrated with their existing software systems, and then provide managers with the visibility to monitor, analyze, control and improve the execution of those processes in real time. To be a comprehensive BPM platform a system must not only automate processes, it must:

	Integrate with existing operational systems such as ERP and databases
	Integrate business processes with those of a company's suppliers and partners
	Incorporate the business rules that guide a business
	Provide managers with the visibility into those automated processes to monitor
	operations in real time
	Offer managers the ability to deal with exceptions when they occur by changing
	business rules or entire processes to respond to business conditions in real time