BPM and SOA are the new buzzwords in Enterprise Application development. Business Process Management or BPM is the practice of automating an organization's business processes thereby improving the overall efficiency and productivity of the organization. BPM offers a programmatic structure for designing transactions and executing them using automated decisions, tasks and sequence flows. The items are identified and tracked as they move through each step, with either specified people or applications processing the information.

• Each company's business processes are unique to its business model, the BPM solution chosen must be a perfect fit for the company.

• BPM brings processes, people and information together.

• Though identifying business processes is relatively easy, finding owners for the processes is hard.

• BPM is not just about managing business processes within the enterprise, but involves all the processes of a company with those of its suppliers, business partners, and customers.

• Horizontal automation is what BPM strives for rather than vertical.

The rapid growth of BPM is driven by the increasing recognition that success in today’s economy is driven by the efficiency and effectiveness of the organization and its business processes. Depending on the process, a BPM focus can improve organizational productivity and responsiveness, reduce costs, and/or accelerate cycle times. Ultimately, a quality BPM focus is a key driver for profitability.

TrackIT is a Business Process Management solution developed by United Electronics for Envestnet Asset Management headquartered in Chicago, IL, with offices in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Denver and India. TrackIT connects people working in different timezones and geographic locations. The workflow software was developed on top of jBPM, a popular open source Java workflow engine. jBPM is a flexible, extensible workflow management system. Business processes, expressed in a simple and powerful language and packaged in process archives, serve as input for the jBPM runtime engine. jBPM bridges the gap between users and developers by giving them a common language, jBPM Process definition language (jPDL). jBPM serves as an excellent integration platform because it's packaged as a J2EE-application. It provides the following features:

• Powerful XML based jPDL language for expressing process flows

• Swimlanes and task assignments

• Dynamic routing of tasks

The input of jBPM is a set of formal business processes descriptions. These formal descriptions are called process archives. After loading a process archive, users or systems perform single steps of the process. jBPM maintains the state, logs and performs all automated actions. It can be used in the simplest environment like an ant task and scale up to a clustered J2EE application.

A process archive is deployed in a web template (.WAR), that is usually deployed while configuring jBPM. This WAR file (web application) acts as a container for the process archive (.par) files. After a process archive is deployed, jBPM can manage the executions of this process. 'Managing the executions' means keeping track of the state of a process, storing information associated with process execution, integrating custom programming logic like sending emails, interacting with an ERP, and optionally allow users to complete tasks by submitting forms.

TrackIT does more than Business Process Management - it can automatically start business processes from customer emails and faxes, so that customer service requests are forwarded to the correct department. It can track file and document movements between departments, and is also an enterprise document management system.