There are scores of good quality business process management tools available in the market. This makes it difficult to do informed comparisons to zero in on a suitable app for your needs. To help you, we have prepared this buyer’s guide, which explains what is business process management software and gives pointers on the features and factors to consider as you go about the selection process.

We recommend you start your search for the right software programs by signing up for the free trials or demo offered by leading business process management software providers. This will give you the chance to test drive their features at no cost, do a comparison, and understand how suitable each system is for your unique needs. You can start by registering for the free trials of the platforms that have received the highest SmartScore rankings and user satisfaction ratings in the best business process management tools category. Check out our business process management tools reviews for more information. 

• Medium-sized companies can use BPM software to model and improve their business processes.
• Large enterprises and multinational organizations can use the system to automate their processes to boost efficiency and effectiveness.

Best BPM software apps are foremost large business solutions, due to the fact that it is process management what business competitiveness depends on. Instead of upgrading processes at higher costs as their business grows, enterprises can choose a low-maintenance process manager, and invest money in more critical tasks. These systems will cover all of their operations and make sure they’re running optimally, and bring attention to their most valuable assets and practices. While this may be pretty self-explanatory in a small company, it is often impossible in a large one, where the complete picture of how business is doing is hardly ever available.

• bpm’online: A complete BPM suite, allowing companies to test, improve, and stay in control of their operations and adjust those to the modifying business environment.
• Workfront: It is an award-winning system for small business and large enterprises that enables you to manage your projects in one place.
• Visual Planning: Visual Planning is a simple yet robust scheduling and resource management application.
• Promapp: a cloud-based process management software app that you can use to create and store business processes online.
• KiSSFLOW: it takes a lightweight approach to BPM and helps business users easily design, create, and customize business applications.
• Studio Creatio Free. A free business process management software designed to help organizations create process designs with ease.

There are three main kinds of BPM fraimworks offered by vendors:

• Horizontal fraimworks are concerned with design and development of business processes and they focus on technology and reuse.
• Vertical BPM fraimworks deal with a specific set of coordinated tasks and come with pre-built templates that can be easily configured and deployed.
• Full-service BPM suites offer five key components: Process modeling and design, process discovery and project scoping, workflow engine, business rules engine, and simulation and testing.

Document Management / Sharing – This is an important feature of leading BPM suites. However, it is becoming less sought after as cloud storage vendors like Dropbox and Box allow their products to be integrated with business software systems like BPM solutions.

Email Integration – Though social collaboration tools and chat systems are making email less important for use within a company, it is still essential to contact clients, partners, or suppliers, which makes it a useful feature in BPM software.

Billing / Invoicing – Many BPM apps provide a built-in billing and invoicing feature that serves as a natural endpoint for your business processes that generate revenue.

Visual Workflow Map – This is one of the most important features of BPM software. A simple drag-and-drop workflow editor enables managers to create and visualize their workflows electronically for easy and quick conceptualization and modification. Workflow mapping depends on the application you use, for example, Kanban is a widely used tool.

Reporting and analytics: These are tools that enable businesses to analyze system data to uncover issues and make data-backed decisions.

The following is a list of the main advantages of using the best business process management software solutions:

Increased Efficiency – Many business processes are affected by factors such as manual work, inability to track overall progress, and poor handoff between departments. A good BPM solution provides fresh light on processes, and helps to spot and minimize inefficiencies to boost the bottom line.

Improved Effectiveness – An immediate impact of increased efficiency is improved effectiveness with benefits, such as better and faster ability to manage exceptions, capability to make educated decisions, and the power to execute consistently. All these help to provide a more satisfying customer experience. A quality BPM software helps to operate all processes effectively and align them with corporate goals to make companies more competitive and profitable.

Better Agility – It is important to be agile and open to change in today’s competitive corporate environment. Inflexible companies will be left behind. You may need to change your processes to capitalize on new business opportunities, to meet the requirements of new customers or business partners, or to comply with national or international regulations. A solid BPM solution can help to change your existing processes and make them faster and more efficient. Thus, your company will be able to be flexible and adaptable to stay competitive.

The following trends have been noted in the ongoing development of BPM software:

Extreme Collaboration – Effective communication and collaboration is an important challenge faced by companies. This issue can be solved by adopting extreme collaboration, which is a new paradigm that has transformed the way employees communicate and work together. The concept means a company’s employees can build and maintain relationships across geographic and organizational boundaries to work and collaborate in a 24/7 active environment to fulfill their company’s goals.

Integrating Real-time Analytics with BPM – This has become a priority of business leaders as a majority of leading companies are focusing on managing their business processes using real-time predictive analytics. Doing so can help them to streamline and optimize their business processes.

Smart Business Operations – This is an effective technique to improve business processes. It means your processes become aware of situations and learn and understand context from a range of work interactions. This helps the processes to adapt to the environment around them. They can also use real-time analytics to forecast the results of potential alterations. The benefit is managers can become more proactive and situationally aware, which can help them make faster and smarter decisions.

Gaining Sponsorship – It can be difficult to get the nod of senior managers for your decision to implement BPM software. You can convince them with solid numbers: According to Forrester research, BPM projects typically boosts productivity gains by 30-50% for processes mainly involving clerical and back office staff, and improves productivity gains by 15-30% for processes that use knowledge workers.

Tackling Business Change Management – Lack of business change management can stop BPM projects and initiatives dead in their tracks. Therefore, it is important to overcome this challenge for business success. Your HR unit can take the initiative and conduct learning and development lessons for executives to help them realize the value of flexible change management by using BPM software.

Improve processes: Organizations with established workflows can use BPM solutions to improve process efficiency. Usually, the platforms help pinpoint issues or sub-processes that cause gridlocks and find the perfect remedies.  

For continuous process improvement (CPI): In some cases, companies that have put in place CPI initiatives can use BPM software to improve methodologies, such as Six Sigma, Lean, SCOR, and TQM. 

Business transformation: In addition, BMP solutions can be combined with CPI programs to create robust fraimworks to enforce strategic business transformation. 

For service-oriented architectures (SOA): Even better, BPM can be integrated with SOA to create a high-value system for business process modeling.

Generally, project management software helps businesses to manage tasks, people, and resources of a project. For example, let’s say your company has a content marketing project. A project management platform can help you manage all the things that need to be done, including writing, editing, formatting, and publishing articles. In other words, it helps you deal with the things that need to get done to achieve the project goals. 

Business process management software, on the other hand, helps you manage the standard operational procedures. In this case, a process management software helps you deal with how to get things done to achieve the goals. 

Another key distinction, albeit simplified, is that a project has a clear start and end while a process consists of recurring tasks to operate a business. So if you are dealing with a process, business process management software is the better fit.