Business process

Summary

A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks performed by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a particular customer or customers. Business processes occur at all organizational levels and may or may not be visible to the customers. A business process may often be visualized (modeled) as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a process matrix of a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process. The benefits of using business processes include improved customer satisfaction and improved agility for reacting to rapid market change. Process-oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos. O

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_process

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Optimization of the business processes within a Swiss-Chinese collaborative network and development of an assessment methodology for new members

2007

Capturing Design Rationale with Functional Decomposition of Roles in Business Processes Modeling

Pavel Balabko, Nicolas Clément, Alain Wegmann

Enterprises need to create and maintain the fit between their business processes and their business process support (BPS) systems. This frequently requires re-engineering of business processes. If the business processes design ration-ales are made explicit, the re-engineering of the existing business processes is easier. Making the design rationales ex-plicit is useful to understand why things exist as they are, and to understand if and how they can be changed. The most common way to capture design rationales is to list the design decisions underlying the business process. In the method proposed in this publication, we capture design rationales through role modeling. We document the design rationales for each role in the analyzed business process. The roles are described as the compositions of base func-tionalities. A base functionality is the specification of a role (or of a part of a role) from the viewpoint of one of the specific specialists who design the business process. These base functionalities are composed together to describe the roles of the participants to the business process. As a result, a business process modeler can understand who is respon-sible of what in the business processes. In collaboration with the specialists, the business modeler can then ensure that no important part of the business process is missing or is unnecessary. Thanks to this work, the business process can be verified before being automated with the BPS system.

2005

The Value of Roles in Modeling Business Processes

Pavel Balabko, Nicolas Clément, Alain Wegmann

Rapid business changes require companies to make rapid changes in business processes and ultimately in BPS systems. These changes can be done rapidly if business modelers understand the base roles of business processes and relationships between these roles. In this paper we present an alternative to the traditional business processes modeling approaches. In our approach we make explicit roles present in business processes. This facilitates business process reengineering and improves the alignment between business and supporting systems.

2004