Business process management, simply put, is an activity that aims to manage and continuously improve an organisation’s business processes, i.e., those chains of activities and events that result in a thing being produced or completed – e.g., the process of manufacturing a good, or generating an invoice. Frequently, BPM involves automating said processes first.

Then there’s workflow, which, per SearchCIO. com, “is a term used to describe the tasks, procedural steps, organisations or people involved, required input and output information, and tools needed for each step in a business process”. This is the part of the BPM family that has achieved the greatest traction in the local market. Very few companies are doing ‘real’ BPM, however, which means that few are reaping the benefits.