Business Process Management (BPM) is undergoing a renaissance today within the manufacturing world as an effective approach to not only improve interoperability between systems, people and equipment, but to also enhance operational agility. Common reasons for this growing preference include ease of use and deployment. BPM-based application architectures can easily support frequent changes to business processes, a requirement that has become increasingly important within manufacturing industries seeking to improve responsiveness to changing market and supply chain conditions.

For example, the electric vehicle and solar energy industries are now experiencing compressed product life cycles where new models are frequently introduced. Considerable flexibility in an IT system infrastructure is critical when continuously modifying and improving the systems infrastructure that supports and enables business processes.

Read an interview with Chris Will, Apriso’s CTO, on what is driving the need for BPM in manufacturing.

Today there is an increasing desire to standardize best practices across multiple locations as a way to enhance Lean, Six Sigma and other continuous improvement initiatives. These requirements add further pressure for a flexible system capable of supporting frequent changes. Apriso applications all include embedded or “native” BPM as part of their application architecture. This means that every application shares a common data model, and that processes can be easily managed, adjusted and improved on an “end-to-end” basis, spanning production, warehouse, quality, maintenance and time and labor activities.

In order to achieve the most benefits from a BPM for manufacturing solution, it is best to have established good corporate governance, a process-centric orientation and a fast implementation methodology. Leveraging BPM and a process-centric orientation are essential to both achieving agility and shortening implementation time frames. Furthermore, an iterative deployment strategy supported by prototyping can help further accelerate delivery of these types of projects. Read this success story to learn more.