'Light' workflow as an alternative to traditional BPM

Business process management has been the domain of big technology firms, all of whom offer deeply technical systems aims at “orchestration” of business processes – mainly the connecting together of existing systems in an attempt to create end to end workflows that span such systems.

With the increasing move towards cloud based services and software as a service initiatives, such systems are being migrated to the cloud.

But what about small companies, start-ups, even single individual companies, who are beginning to leverage cloud based apps for businesses such as Google apps for work, online editions of Microsoft office etc?

Are they going to hook up a BPM engine to connect their sales pipeline to their order generation and accounting software all of which they run online?

No, they don’t have an IT department and in any case are too busy running their businesses to invest heavily in deep business process design.

Well, until now. Online ‘Software-as-a-service’ workflow such as Cloudstream provide a ‘light’ alternative to traditional BPM.

Such systems allow non technical users to assemble small to medium complexity business processes into online Apps which are , really, business processes running on the cloud.

The key to Cloudstream’s success is the use of non technical, intuitive user interfaces to assemble online forms, connect them to process flows (workflows) and then assign tasks to different uses.

Small businesses can start putting process discipline at a fraction of the cost and effort needed with traditional BPM. And still get the full benefit of end to end process automation, including the ability to leverage online application suites from Google and Microsoft, while providing a high degree of process visibility through reports and charts