Business, Legal & Accounting Glossary
A business process or business method is a collection of interrelated tasks, which solve a particular issue.
There are three types of business processes:
A business process can be decomposed into several sub-processes, which have their own attributes but also contribute to achieving the goal of the super-process. The analysis of business processes typically includes the mapping of processes and sub-processes down to activity level.
Business Process Modeling Notation can be used for drawing business processes in a workflow.
One of the first people to describe processes was Adam Smith in his famous (1776) example of an English pin factory. He described the production of a pin in the following way:
”One man draws out the wire, another straights it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations: to put it on is a particular business, to whiten the pins is another … and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which in some manufactories are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometime perform two or three of them.”
Smith also first recognized how the output could be increased through the use of labour division. Previously, in a society where production was dominated by handcrafted goods, one man would perform all the activities required during the production process, while Smith described how the work was divided into a set of simple tasks, which would be performed by specialized workers. The result of labour division in Smith’s example resulted in productivity increasing by 24,000 per cent (sic), i.e. that the same number of workers made 240 times as many pins as they had been producing before the introduction of labour division.
It is worth noting that Smith did not advocate labour division at any price and per se. The appropriate level of task division was defined through experimental design of the production process. In contrast to Smith’s view which was limited to the same functional domain and comprised activities that are in direct sequence in the manufacturing process, today’s process concept includes cross-functionality as an important characteristic. Following his ideas, the division of labour was adopted widely, while the integration of tasks into functional, or cross-functional, processes were not considered as an alternative option until much later.
Frederick Winslow Taylor developed the concept of scientific management. The concept contains aspects of the division of labour being relevant to the theory and practice around business processes. The business process-related aspects of Taylor’s scientific management concept are discussed in the article on Business Process Reengineering.
The span of control is the number of subordinates a supervisor manages within a structural organization. Introducing a business process concept has a considerable impact on the structural elements of the organization and thus also on the span of control.
Large organizations that are not organized as markets need to be organized in smaller units – departments – which can be defined according to different principles.
Information Management and the organization design strategies being related to it, are a theoretical cornerstone of the business process concept.
In the early 1990s, US corporations, and subsequently companies all over the world, started to adopt the concept of reengineering in an attempt to re-achieve the competitiveness that they had lost during the previous decade. A key characteristic of Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the focus on business processes. Davenport (1993) defines a (business) process as
”a structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focus’s emphasis on what. A process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs: a structure for action. … Taking a process approach implies adopting the customer’s point of view. Processes are the structure by which an organization does what is necessary to produce value for its customers.”
This definition contains certain characteristics a process must possess. These characteristics are achieved by a focus on the business logic of the process (how work is done), instead of taking a product perspective (what is done). Following Davenport’s definition of a process, we can conclude that a process must have clearly defined boundaries, input and output, that it consists of smaller parts, activities, which are ordered in time and space, that there must be a receiver of the process outcome- a customer – and that the transformation taking place within the process must add customer value.
Hammer & Champy’s (1993) definition can be considered as a subset of Davenport’s. They define a process as
”a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer.”
As we can note, Hammer & Champy have a more transformation oriented perception, and put less emphasis on the structural component–process boundaries and the order of activities in time and space.
Rummler & Brache (1995) use a definition that clearly encompasses a focus on the organization’s external customers, when stating that
”a business process is a series of steps designed to produce a product or service. Most processes (…) are cross-functional, spanning the ‘white space’ between the boxes on the organization chart. Some processes result in a product or service that is received by an organization’s external customer. We call these primary processes. Other processes produce products that are invisible to the external customer but essential to the effective management of the business. We call these support processes.”
The above definition distinguishes two types of processes, primary and support processes, depending on whether a process is directly involved in the creation of customer value, or concerned with the organization’s internal activities. In this sense, Rummler and Brache’s definition follows Porter’s value chain model, which also builds on a division of primary and secondary activities. According to Rummler and Brache, a typical characteristic of a successful process-based organization is the absence of secondary activities in the primary value flow that is created in the customer oriented primary processes. The characteristic of processes as spanning the white space on the organization chart indicates that processes are embedded in some form of organizational structure. Also, a process can be cross-functional, i.e. it ranges over several business functions.
Finally, let us consider the process definition of Johansson et al. (1993). They define a process as
”a set of linked activities that take an input and transform it to create an output. Ideally, the transformation that occurs in the process should add value to the input and create an output that is more useful and effective to the recipient either upstream or downstream.”
This definition also emphasizes the constitution of links between activities and the transformation that takes place within the process. Johansson et.al. also include the upstream part of the value chain as a possible recipient of the process output. Summarizing the four definitions above, we can compile the following list of characteristics for a business process.
Frequently, a process owner, i.e. a person being responsible for the performance and continuous improvement of the process, is also considered as a prerequisite.
To help you cite our definitions in your bibliography, here is the proper citation layout for the three major formatting styles, with all of the relevant information filled in.
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This glossary post was last updated: 18th April, 2020 | 0 Views.