Disorder is the author of confusion. If you want your business operations to be efficient and customers to be happy with excellent customer service, you need to do “Business By Design”. That means BPM and Business Dashboards.

The Forrester Wave for Digital Process Automation has included Bonita BPM in their most recent report. I have used Bonita for modelling a number of times, and got to some decent detail. I haven’t developed an application on Bonita yet – primarily because I’ve used cloud based platforms like Flokzu, Flowingly and RunMyProcess. The advantage of cloud platforms is they are so easy to set up! Many cloud platforms however lack the full BPMN 2.0 features, which limits their capacity for complex apps.

Flokzu is an exception to this, and has a wonderful, richly featured design environment. What Flokzu lacks is direct integrations though. The Flokzu crew made the decision to use Zapier for integrations, which let them concentrate on providing full BPMN 2.0 functionality in the design environment and BPM engine. Flokzu is my favourite cloud based BPM platform, although (as most others do) the ‘low code’ part of the produce needs maturing.

Back to Bonita. Bonita does have a cloud now at https://www.bonitasoft.com/bonita-cloud. What interests me about Bonita, and has for nearly ten years now, is the open source nature of the product and their business model. I am working on a product I’ve had in my head for years, and Bonita forms part of the package. The open-source Bonita BPM Community version naturally lacks some features present in the full blown commercial version, but it enables me to wrap it into a productised offering. So I’m learning the ins and outs of Bonita as I test my assumptions and develop my design further, which includes use of REST services to access other platforms.

BPM platforms need to be picked on a ‘horses for courses’ basis. They all have strengths and weaknesses. They all may have vendor/provisioning costs and, one way or another, runtime costs. They all have training overheads and possibly deployment considerations. There will always be areas that take more learning, focus or problem solving.

I’m no longer in the large corporate space; I work predominantly with small the medium sized businesses. What I focus on is how SMEs can leverage these kind of technologies to achieve cost-effective, process driven business improvement with real continuous improvement benefits.

Where are you art in your BPM journey? Where is your business at? Have you defined business processes that assist your business to perform consistently? Have you implemented the processes into an BPM automation platform yet? Importantly, have you correlated organisational design and KPIs into the processes so you can monitor business performance? Do you have a business dashboard set up?

https://www.bonitasoft.com/forrester-wave-digital-process-automation-software-q4-2021

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Steve Barnes
The Process Expert
mob +61 483 891 835