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As we said before, BPM software is a powerful instrument for the automation of your business. And it can be used as a standalone application or be integrated with your custom software to make it more agile and effective. More information about the importance and advantages of BPM, you can find in our previous article “Business Automation Strategies Overview”.
Regardless of its usefulness, most of the on-market standalone BPM systems have high complexity, low quality and can not be recommended for usage like a robust solution for your business and especially for integration with your software products.
This article doesn’t target to make some advertisement or anti-advertisement. The main goal is to point out the most crucial points that you have to take into account when you are looking for the BPM solution. So let’s go!
First of all, you have to understand what type of application is in front of you. It is the first question and it will save you a lot of time and money.
The next step you have to make it clear what amount of documentation is available, how the support team is working and what the complexity level tasks they can help you with, in the worst case make a research to find a community of targeted system and some real feedback from real clients.
Obviously, the absence of proper documentation and support will make the usage of the BPM system very hard or, more likely, make it impossible.
If you planning to extend your existing software with an external BPM functionality you gonna fail this target without high-quality API. Before making the final decision, it would be very useful to take into account the following points.
Of course, you can have some additional requirements and expectations for the functionality, so that’s why this list is not limited and can be extended.
Standalone BPM software always working with dynamic (user-defined) data structures, what is always means much more complex queries to the data storage, more complex data transformations during its processing and updating. That’s why the usage of BPM software always has decreased performance comparing to classically designed software. On the other hand, there are a lot of examples of classical applications with poor architecture design which significantly decreases its performance.
The main conclusion we can do, the performance of BPM solutions totally depends on the particular implementation. And in most of the cases, a well-designed BPM system can show much better performance than a poorly designed classically designed application.
It is hard to make such decision blindly. More likely, you will not face this problem in the early stages of the system adoption but soon, when the amount of processing data will be increased, you will face a lot of nasty surprises. To make this choice without any regrets, it would be nice to advise you to spend some extra time on performance testing.
The question of how is your data stored and where is one of the most important questions for any business. Let’s take a look at the most important data-related aspects together:
The main concept is - the business data, created or operated via BPM software, has to be available for any other type of processing by any other software in your IT infrastructure. BPM engine should not encapsulate your business data and make it unavailable for you.
Since BPM software provides customizable forms or other possibilities for UI customization, it is much better to have maximal freedom in this direction. Let’s see what key options do we have:
Most of the businesses do not need such functionality, so this point is very frequently being ignored. But if your company is bigger than 100 employees or your service is supposed to be used by hundreds or thousands of external users, you will need to scale it accordingly to growing load.
And of course the price! As you can see from the points above, the selection of the BPM solution is quite a challenging task. You can be totally engrossed by the research of the best solution for your project. But in the end, when the solution is found, you can stay face to face with the price of the solution which can make it totally unacceptable.
As you can see, the search for a BPM solution is a very complex and responsible task. The decision-making process includes too many aspects and questions. Without any doubt, you will have a lot of compromises to find a solution that will totally satisfy your needs. So I would be very happy if this article will help you to make the right choice in this hard question.
But if you already spend a lot of time struggling with such research and never found some worthy choice, do not hurry to give up and put BPM aside. You can make your own BPM software or workflow engine implementation. To learn more about this idea you can read or technical guidelines about BPM software implementation: “BPM software implementation guideline“.
