Organisational inefficiency. Those are dirty words, especially for companies under pressure to perform profitably when changing business conditions demand more for less. With enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, and all their subdivisions - supply chain management, inventory control and more - introduced to combat organisational inefficiency by many companies in the past, the clever chaps in software companies, consulting firms and universities around the world have sought new methods to further improve corporate performance. One field rising to prominence is that of business process management, and its subset, workflow.

It is true to claim that ERP, in many ways, was introduced to improve business processes - but it`s also true to say that not every company got what it expected when deploying ERP systems. (There is a standing joke about one of the biggest ERP vendors: that there is no such thing as a complete deployment of its software.) However, with the majority of these systems bedded down and delivering what they promised to in the first place, the focus for many companies is shifting to BPM.