Dashboards are part of the BPM suite, notes Kristick: "We capture the data sources to look into your process, and the process you defined can be measured, the cycle times and so on."

All software uses business rules, but in BPM, the business rules are explicitly listed and separate from the code. Said Kristick: "Supposing your process is a credit card application, and you want to see the effect on the card issuer's revenue income of changing the qualifying household income. You just change the business rule and the modeling environment tells you the answer. And if you want to implement the new income limit, you do not have to touch the code, since you have already changed the business rule."

Tibco's Business Process Management offering is Staffware Process Suite, version 10.3, launched in February 2006, which is also designed to work more closely with Tibco's BusinessWorks application integration software, an SOA suite. These two software packages can be used to transform legacy business applications into reusable services, which can be combined to create complex business processes.

By integrating the two product lines, users can take advantage of real-time monitoring capabilities that provide greater visibility and insight into business process performance. Said Kristick: "Because they are both Tibco products, there's a much tighter coupling. We can do things like data validation and end-to-end testing of processes."

The Tibco BPM suite also enables users to utilize applications written as SOA (Service Oriented Architecture), said Kristick. "Now you can use them within your business processes, and actually make changes, without us having to go and write code for six months."