BPM or Business Process Management.
I was in the process of writing an article describing the many benefits of BPM (for the uninitiated) when I came across the following article: "What is Business Process Management?" So I tossed mine aside and linked to it here. Below is a brief excerpt from the article and you can catch the full write-up after the jump.
"Visibility: BPM streamlines and brings to light business processes and their day to day inner workings. Increased visibility in this area makes tasks such as optimization and efficiency monitoring notably easier to perform.
Analysis: business processes are notoriously difficult to analyze in the absence of BPM. A lack of analyses in this area can cause a company loss of revenue through inefficient, costly processes.
Security: BPM is a useful tool in fraud prevention, auditing, and assessment of regulation compliance.
Efficiency: whether through convergence (pulling together of data from services across the network and unifying them under one user interface), reduced lead-times, increased potential to identify areas in need of optimization, or a better understanding and definition of in-company duties, BMP can drastically improve a company’s efficiency."