This website favors the following definitions of business process management (or simply “process management”) and its delimitation to business process reengineering:

Business process management (BPM) cannot be considered as a single BPR project but it deals with how to manage processes on an ongoing basis (Armistead and Machin, 1997).

BPR often addresses the reengineering of individual processes only. Therefore the BPR approach often treats processes as unconnected islands. However, the success of an organization also depends on how its business processes interact. Moreover, reengineering experts virtually do not state how to manage a business process after reengineering. Though, business processes still have to be managed after being reengineered (Garvin, 1995).

A firm which has adopted the process-view of its organization, regardless of whether it has already run through BPR and/or process improvement projects or not, is concerned with the management of its business processes (Armistead and Machin, 1998).

Business process management does not only incorporate the discovery, design, deployment and execution of business processes, but also interaction, control, analysis and optimization of processes (Smith and Fingar, 2002).

“Process management seeks to improve processes continuously so that the products and services meet the ever-changing expectations of the internal and external customers.” (Hinterhuber, 1995)

Business process management is a management philosophy that focuses on organizing the organization around its business processes (Harmon and Wolf, 2007).