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Technology | WFM

What are RPA, iBPM and WFM?

Words by Martin Kelman
What are RPA, iBPM and WFM?
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New technology often requires a new lexicon, a single word to mask the complexity of an ever more complex world. Some language reflects what the technology does and others like cloud project an image of accessibility across the global.

When we started out on our own journey into new technology, we wanted to look beyond our traditional applications and standards, to challenge our own biases and preconceptions. We wanted our domain knowledge, our legacy, to guide us but not control us. My domain knowledge is in manufacturing operation management and the applications that support it.

We started to think “What If”. What if we could create a flexible, configurable platform that would allow both us and our customers to work together and capture our domain knowledge into a system, making that instantly available across the globe? So, this is what we set out to do.

Soon we had created cloud native applications that could achieve this goal, but what marketplace do we sell them into? How to sell into a market when the market doesn’t really have a name? This is when we came across three terms that seemed to fit: Intelligent Business Process Mapping (iBPM), Workflow Management (WFM) and Robot Process Automation (RPA).

What is RPA?

RPA can be defined as, a set of software tools that can be used by the customer as a low code/no code capability that can interface with other applications and users to replace repetitive human tasks.

What is WFM?

WFM is about understanding and managing the tasks that make up an employee or a businesses operations. How these tasks are linked together, what they depend on, where they begin and how they are completed; all these elements come together to make a workflow. By using WFM, you identify and understand these workflows and try to optimise them.

What is iBPM?

iBPM can be defined as a set of software tools that can be used by the customer as a low-code/no-code capability that can interface with other applications, machines, IoT, and users that enable’s dynamic changes in operating models and procedures, documented as models, directly driving the execution of business operations.

Are you any clearer? This is the problem with labels: they are hard to agree on, but once you own them, they are hard to shift, and often the customer is none the wiser.

So the best way is to try before you buy, this is why we offer a freemium model to our customers, so they can touch, play and feel the power of these new tools, new technologies and most importantly methodologies.