Business Process Management and Decision Management

Identifying and managing the decisions within a process and automating them using business rules are critical next steps for greater efficiency and effectiveness in organizations today. The focus of automation to date has been on efficiency gains from streamlined workflow, automated integration of information systems and managed worklists. Many largely automated processes remain over-reliant on human intervention at critical junctures. Others are burdened with legacy code or complex processes to handle decision making and are unnecessarily resistant to change as a result. Combining process management and decision management decreases process complexity and increases business agility and engagement.

Decrease process complexity

Dynamic processes can be overly complex with multiple paths and complex routing. Extracting the decision and putting it first creates a dynamic process—one driven by the specific customer, case or transaction—without increasing process complexity.

A European agency took this approach and found it had one simple, decision-intensive process, not the 30 processes it had expected.

Explicit decision handling also increases the rate of straight through processing (STP) and reduces the number of processes that wait while items are put on worklists or in queues. This marriage of explicit decisions and process management keeps transactions moving with only exceptions ending up on worklists. Staff can then focus on higher value activities.

An insurance company used decision management to handle the majority of underwriting decisions, freeing underwriters to work with agents to grow the business and reduced their combined ratio, a critical cost measure, by 8 points.

Increase agility and engagement

Business users like process management software because it allows them to change their workflow easily. Decision Management takes this flexibility to the next step, because business changes often involve changes to business decisions—to pricing, eligibility or risk assessment decisions, for example. Decision management allows business users to control processes and the critical decisions within them.

A high tech manufacturer used business rules to puts its engineers in charge of decision making in its diagnostic system and got a six-fold improvement in time to market.

Opportunities to apply analytics

Applying analytics is a major focus for many organizations. The power of analytics lies in making better decisions. Decision management allows analytics to be applied to data about process execution and data about customer behavior. Advanced decisioning puts these analytics to work embedding more precise, more profitable decisions in your business processes.

A Warehouse Club used advanced analytics to personalize its cross-sell offers, making them precisely targeted by analyzing historical sales data, and achieved a 2000% increase in offer acceptance.

Learn More

To learn more about how to apply decision management to achieve process excellence, check out our free on-demand webinars, whitepapers and briefs or contact us.

• Increasing BPM Agility and Effectiveness with Decision Management
• The Decisions at the Heart of Your Process
• Simplifying Over-Complex Processes with Decision Management
• Advanced Decisioning for Process Excellence or download the brief.
• Business rules and decisioning for process experts

Please email us to learn more about decision management and next generation business process management at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it