Applications are the backbone of your business. To run your business, you need many applications and systems like ERP, SCM, CRM, and Billing. Since companies acquired these applications during different time periods, they end up with disjointed applications and rigid silo'ed departmental processes locked inside the applications. Many applications were implemented years ago and selected for very specific business needs but with time the needs change. At that point companies tend to make point changes to the software to meet those needs. Such changes to applications not only take time to implement but are extremely hard to maintain.

With time, the needs of business keep changing, and applications fail to keep pace with the changing needs. This creates impedance mismatch between the business needs and application capabilities. The result is decreasing business performance, less profit, waste in R&D or lower market share because of delays in time-to-market of new products and services.

Business Process agility refers to the speed and flexibility with which process based applications can keep up with the needs of changing business conditions and minimize the gap between business needs and IT systems. Oracle Business Process Management Suite delivers such agility.

With Oracle BPM Suite you can create process based applications that help you orchestrate human and system activities across departmental and applications silos. It provides the necessary visibility and agility to manage and run your business efficiently.

Using BPM to extend your existing applications has following key benefits:

• Better visibility into the end-to-end processes and KPIs
• Enhanced Agility. Since BPM is all model driven, business managers can design and update the process as and when required without spending months on modifying underlining applications.
• If you move your customizations to BPM layer, rather than in the application itself, it keeps your applications clean, better performing and easy to upgrade.
• You can add additional capabilities like social or mobile to existing applications as BPM suite supports those capabilities too.
• Last but not least, BPM is not a rip-n-replace of your existing applications. It is enhancing them with newer capabilities.

Let the applications do what they are designed to do the best. Move the rest of extensions in BPM layer for better visibility, agility and efficiency.

For more information visit www.oracle.com/appadvantage  and download resources on BPM suite at www.oracle.com/bpm.