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When BPM meets DPA, the outcome is transformative

By Marilyn de Villiers
Johannesburg, 15 Dec 2017

The ability of organisations to be agile, efficient and contextual in responding to evolving customer needs and market dynamics is no longer a key differentiator. Rather, it's merely what's required to survive in today's highly competitive business environment.

That's the view of Saurabh Bisht, who is responsible for global analyst engagement at Newgen Software, a global provider of BPM solutions headquartered in India who maintains that automating underlying processes are key for organisations to achieve a customer-centric, digital ecosystem.

"Investments in the web, mobile and apps alone will not help unless back-end processes are aligned to deliver an enhanced customer experience across channels," he explains.

All this is having a major impact on business process management (BPM). Traditionally, businesses across different industries have relied on BPM to streamline business processes and manage costs through its process management capabilities such as integration, orchestration, monitoring and others.

Now, Bisht says, the focus has shifted from managing costs to enhancing customer experience.

He points out that although BPM has evolved over the years to leverage SMAC (social, mobile, analytics, cloud) technologies in order to meet changing and growing business needs, it now has to evolve further.

"Improved customer experience and the need to drive digital transformation initiatives has evolved the BPM market into Digital Process Automation (DPA). As the market evolves, organisations will need to evaluate how DPA accelerates their digital transformation journey and find the right DPA vendor," he adds.

According to the Forrester Wave: Digital Process Automation Software, Q3 2017 report, which notes that "in many organisations, hundreds, if not thousands, of manual processes stand in the way of digital transformation", businesses wishing to achieve digital transformation will need to leverage DPA.

DPA not only offers traditional BPM capabilities by focusing on cost reduction and compliance, and handling complex and long-running processes, it also supports large numbers of rapid, business-driven applications that focus on customer outcomes.

Rob Koplowitz, author of the Forrester Wave report, noted that DPA represents a major shift from BPM. "The DPA space is a significant expansion from traditional BPM, set apart by an emphasis on low-code development, consumer-grade user experiences, and AI-based innovation. The ability to go deep and wide are key differentiators (for BPM vendors)", he wrote.

Forrester defines deep process applications as "the complex, mission-critical efforts that were the domain of traditional BPM". According to Koplowitz, while those remain relevant, DPA extends that definition to a wide array of more basic, situational process apps that are best led by business users with minimal IT support.

"The shift from traditional BPM to DPA requires solutions that address different approaches, as well as fundamental tension in the market today. To get to full digital transformation, process-driven applications address the deep, complex needs they have traditionally targeted, while at the same time providing a platform for large numbers of rapid, business-driven applications," Koplowitz concludes.

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