A unified Business Process Management (BPM) solution provides an integrated environment for managing the lifecycles of business processes across all process types. We broadly distinguish between human-centric and integration-centric BPM.

Human-centric BPM is designed to more closely align people and processes, relying on user-friendly tools, such as dashboards, in order to help business professionals to better understand and manage those processes. Human-centric processes are typically manual and represent over 70 to 80% of the day to day workflows in an organization. A closer look at human-centric BPM reveals that this category can be further broken down into two subclasses: production workflow and case management. 

Production workflow signifies processes in which the flow of activities is well-defined and based on business rules. Such structured processes can be mapped in a visual manner with predefined exceptions modeled right into the flows. With case management, however, users collaborate at run-time in a more ad hoc fashion. Processes are unstructured. Process activities are not predetermined and may also not be repeatable. Processes and activities (tasks) may be added to a case at run-time.

With integration-centric BPM, the focus is on automation of processes that integrate applications and systems, but may also require human interaction. Integration-centric BPM relies on loosely coupled asynchronous connectivity, leveraging SOA middleware. 

Taking a different viewpoint, we can also identify two distinct modeling approaches: procedural and goal-oriented modeling. Structured business processes are designed using process modeling languages, such as Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), that typically combine a procedural way of specifying the order of activities and an event-based model. Possible courses of action are defined at design time. In contrast, with goal-oriented modeling, the overall process goal is broken down into a hierarchy of sub-goals, each of which encapsulates one or more rule-driven procedural processes. Additional sub-goals and associated processes may be added at run-time.

A unified BPM solution that supports

• both human-centric and integration-centric BPM

• the entire spectrum ranging from structured processes (production workflow) to unstructured or ad hoc processes as is typical for case management

• both procedural and goal-oriented modeling

will yield measurable value in terms of cost savings and productivity gains, both from a lifecycle management and usability perspective. A single point of managing the entire business process lifecycle also provides information consistency and accuracy, access to real-time information, and a "single version of the facts", ensured by the use of a common registry and repository.

When considering licensing and cost issues (acquiring one software product versus multiple products), usability considerations (eliminating the need to learn multiple BPMS), and overall system manageability (maintaining a single product versus multiple systems), the benefits of a truly unified BPM solution become obvious.