Pegasystems, the provider of products designed to enable what it calls “simply smart” business process management (BPM), went to school on the marketplace, and learned some lessons. It saw that the time was right to upgrade its core offering and launch two products geared toward improving customer service and satisfaction, one of which deals specifically with handling exceptions.

In the ebizQ webinar Empowering The Enterprise With Simply Smart BPM, part of the Pegasystems-sponsored series Simply Smart BPM – A Great Insurance Policy, ebizQ Vice President for Strategic Services Beth Gold-Bernstein offered a lesson of overview on the BPM market in general, and where business rules fit in, in particular. Pega’s products revolve around business rules.

“The new business mantra is business agility,” Gold-Bernstein observed. “Agility requires both speed (time to market; time to recognize trends; time to recognize bottlenecks; time to respond to customer demands and requests), and it requires adaptability to change. Businesses need to adapt to consistent and rapid change in order to maintain competitiveness.

“Change is constant, and much more rapid today than it ever was before. Companies are looking to improve operational efficiency and reduce costs while adapting to continuous change and delivering new business solutions faster and cheaper. This is a pretty tall order.”

“That’s the value that BPM brings to an organization today,” Gold-Bernstein continued. “It provides real-time visibility into end-to-end business processes that cross application, platform and organizational boundaries. It enables rapid business change because it gives business managers visibility into the business processes, to recognize bottlenecks as they’re happening, and to respond to them quickly.

“BPM also provides a mechanism for recording and monitoring critical business metrics, to understand what’s happening in the business.

“The BPM market today is expanding rapidly, and converging from a number of different markets. Rules are becoming more prevalent in all the BPM solutions. This is because rules enable greater agility.

“With rules, you can distribute them locally to different business managers, so different business managers can control the rules that manage their processes, and they can respond more quickly to change. Rules can be changed much more easily than changing code or an entire process. So rules provide greater agility,” she concluded.