Business Process Management:

Business Process Management (BPM) is an emerging field of knowledge and research at the intersection between management and information technology, encompassing methods, techniques and tools to design, enact, control, and analyze operational business processes involving humans, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information.
BPM covers activities performed by organizations to manage and, if necessary, to improve their business processes. BPM systems monitor the execution of the business processes so that managers can analyze and change processes in response to data, rather than just a hunch. In short, Business Process Management is a management model that allows the organizations to manage their processes as any other assets and improve and manage them over the period of time.
The activities which constitute business process management can be grouped into five categories: Design, Modeling, Execution, Monitoring, and Optimization.

Process Design encompasses the following:
1. (optionally) The capture of existing processes and documenting their design in terms of Process Map / Flow, Actors, Alerts & Notifications, Escalations, Standard Operating Procedures, Service Level Agreements and task hand-over mechanisms
2. Design the "to-be" process covering all the above process and ensure that a correct and efficient design is theoretically prepared.
Process Modeling encompasses taking the process design and introducing different cost, resource, and other constraint scenarios to determine how the process will operate under different circumstances.
The traditional way to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process.

Monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes so that information on their state can be easily seen and the provision of statistics on the performance of one or more processes.
Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from modeling or monitoring phase and identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and potential rooms for cost savings or other improvements and then applying those enhancements in the design of the process thus continuing the value cycle of business process management.
In a medium to large organization scenario, a good business process management system allows business to accommodate day to day changes in business processes due to competitive, regulatory or market challenges in business processes without overly relying IT departments.