Achieve Agile Enterprise System through Collaboration with BPMS

Packaged enterprise systems (ES) have achieved strategic significance in enterprises as their backbone IT systems since late 80s of last century. They provide rich and standard functionality to support business running. However, the concern that packaged enterprise systems are not agile enough has been discussed for decades. This drawback becomes more and more critical because of the more and more fierce competition. Enterprises are embracing business process management technologies and tools as the solutions of pursuing agility. In recent years, collaboration between packaged enterprise systems with business process management suites (BPMS) becomes more and more important to achieve a balance between standardization and agility. Firstly this paper reviews the history of applying business process management principles, technologies and tools into enterprise system implementation. To achieve a lifecycle ES-BPMS collaboration, this paper proposes a three level solution model with some key considerations for applying the solution into practices. At last this paper lists some existing offerings of enterprise system and BPMS collaboration from major packaged enterprise system and BPMS vendors, also introduces our first attempt with IBM BPM and SAP Enterprise systems.