Business Process Management and Business Transformation Outsourcing are options that one company can add to its strategy. But knowing the similarities and difference between these two can help companies weigh more carefully the costs, savings, and competitive edge these options bring.

Though BPM started earlier than BTO, both offer technological improvements to a company. But the manner of how they inject and deliver technology to a company is perhaps the major difference between them.

Business Process Management’s key offer is a holistic business process improvement. It triggers critical business processes that are not static or what they refer to as complex dynamic processes involving multiple technologies. On the other hand, BTO solutions tend to put innovation in a company’s business processes by updating them through the injection of the latest applicable technology. This puts BTO as an option that offers a suite of software products focused on processes only and BPM is a management principle that expands the solutions a BTO can offer. BPM is not just innovation but rather it is rooted from modeling to execution. And unlike BTO, BPM’s software products are not just focused to processes but also to the system and the people in it. Hence, the selection between BPM and BTO lies on the kind of change a company is aiming for. If the desired change is specific to a process or processes, then BTO can easily suit the company. Otherwise, BPM would be more suitable for a holistic business process improvement that considers the whole product lifecycle.