European Leadership in Process Management

In the mid-1990s, many vendors, such as IBM, Staffware, Filenet, Lotus, and Xerox, provided workflow management (WFM) software. In fact, WFM systems were expected to become an integral part of every information system. Despite these high expectations, only a few organizations successfully used this technology. After the limited success of WFM systems, the scope was broadened beyond automation, leading to a wave of business process management (BPM) systems.1,7 Many organizations documented their processes using notations such as the business process model notation (BPMN), but few successfully used BPM technologies to create information systems driven by process models.8 One of the main reasons was because traditional process management approaches underestimated the complexity and variability of real-world processes and did not explicitly use the data available in existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems.