Business Process Management
Current economic conditions worldwide have re-focused the attention of leaders of many commercial and nonprofit organizations. Operational costs, productivity and efficiency of operations and management have moved to the forefront in these challenging economic times.
Open Source Business Process Management suites have received more attention as managers take a fresh look at the management and operational processes that govern their operations. Small to medium-sized business organizations are looking to Open Source solutions such as Colosa’s ProcessMaker BPM to deliver significant benefits at a cost that is affordable.
ProcessMaker: A Promising Open Source Business Process Management Suite
ProcessMaker, by Colosa, is a commercial Open Source web-based BPM solution. The Open Source Community Edition of ProcessMaker is maintained on Sourceforge. ProcessMaker’s user-base is worldwide, and includes large corporations, government agencies, nonprofit educational organizations and small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs). The application is based on PHP and JavaScript programming and scripting languages, with Oracle’s MySQL as the database technology of choice. ProcessMaker is supported on Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows platforms, and is also offered as a SaaS solution with application hosting provided by Colosa.
Colosa and the ProcessMaker User Community have been busy developing a host of free user support resources. For example, Colosa provides a well-organized ProcessMaker Wiki, where content is continuously update by Colosa employees and registered users. I found over a dozen video tutorials on YouTube, that addressed basic and advanced ProcessMaker development and use topics. The ProcessMaker forums provide another means of requesting support fro Colosa staff and the end-user community. The ProcessMaker Library provides complete applications and tutorials that can be downloaded for free. Last and not in the least, there is the ProcessMaker Blog, where posts include discussions on business process management and trends in Cloud-based computing.
Is ProcessMaker an affordable and practical BPM solution for small to medium-sized organizations? What does it take to install, configure and develop a simple ProcessMaker BPM application that can serve as a pilot project?
Over the next few weeks, join me as I work toward answering these and other questions by creating a ProcessMaker web application on a Linux server. I’ll be documenting my experience and providing step-by-step instructions, so you can get an idea of the time, energy and resources that it will take to bring ProcessMaker BPM into your organization.
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