Businesss processes or workflow?

Are you asking conceptually what is the difference between Business Process Management and Workflow Management or do you mean product-wise BPMonline vs another specific vendor?

BPM is a complete suite when Workflow is a small shadow of it. First, with the BPM you can visualize diagram where you can see all steps, involved in the particular process, what you can not do in Workflow. Second, with the BPM, in our system specifically, there is no coding in design process – simply click, drag and drop using plain English text. In Workflow coding is involved and here you will need to employ someone with programming skills. Third, with BPM you can improve process on the fly. In a case with Workflow, you need to have time, space and place to make an improvement on a process.

Thanks, Andres. I am asking regarding conceptual difference between two notions, but I would also be interested in competitive advantages of BPMonline in this field.

Patricia, I apologize for taking so long to answer; to be honest, I forgot that I had commented here (as a side note to BPMonline Moderators making an RSS feed of posts available would be handy). Back to your question Patricia, to add to what Olga mentioned:

As I understand it, workflow, conceptually, is directing documents and tasks to the right person in a business. In terms of software, it's the software that enables you to do this efficiently. Sometimes it can be an automated process where you creating a certain document will route it to the correct person that needs to process it. Workflow is a specific type of business process. Business Process Management is the bigger picture so to speak. There are many other types of business processes (aside from simple task and document management) that can be made more efficient through software. There is also another conceptual difference between Business Process Management and Workflow Management in that workflow management is very linear. A happens, then B then C and D. Business Process Management gives you much more flexibility. You can design the business process to include different possibilities. Think of decision trees. A happens, then B depends on C and D and you can create a process that handles these different scenarios. This can get complicated, especially when you want to design a software system to automate all of it. This is where the strength of BPMonline comes in to play. As Olga explains there is a process design system that is very robust yet uncomplicated. It's a visual system that requires little to no programming to accomplish quite a bit. It's the reason my company decided to work with BPMonline, there's not really anything like it on the market. Additionally, Business Process Management is only half of the equation with BPMonline. To answer your second question about the competitive advantages of BPMonline, they have robust Customer/Contact Relationship Management functionality as a core competency. Their software combines two very essential functions to every business and allows you to automate them in a powerful way for a lot less than it would cost you to do it if you were to try to build it yourself or contract it out. It's definitely worth the cost if used well and they go through great lengths to make sure they fit it to your needs. At least, that has been my experience.