All businesses have over periods of time established for themselves a sequence by which activities occur. This sequence of activities is called a process. The flow of a 'transaction' across the activities is called Workflow. Businesses have also evolved 'Business Rules' which govern the flow of the transactions into one branch of the process or the other.

In recent years, organizations have realized that there is a huge potential for improving operating efficiencies through reduction of costs and increase in output by Automating processes. The first processes to get automated were those that were in the frontline of business. However, as software solutions providers started dealing with a large number of organizations that needed to be automated, with each organization following unique differentials at various points in the process, it was realized that some sort of standardization was essential. This was introduced under the banner of Reengineering.

Organizations were forced to recast their processes to suit the way Enterprise Applications liked them to be, i.e. in line with the benchmark methods. Also, since each piece of Enterprise Application was provided by a different third party, there were issues regarding these applications talking to one another. There was a rapid creation of 'silos' that refused to talk to each other leading to areas of information drought.

Business Process Management and Automation software, on the other hand is a genre of software that allows automation of business processes as they stand today. This technology is quickly gaining ground and has the potential to completely change the way processes are run and managed in businesses. It promises to deliver tremendous improvements in efficiency and has the potential of making available information on how processes actually run and how they can be finetuned for even greater efficiency.