Business Process Modelling

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1. What is a BUSINESS PROCESS?

The organisational functions of a business do not operate independently from one another.  Business processes reflect the unique way in which organisations co-ordinate work, information and knowledge.

Generating and fulfilling an order, designing and developing a new product, hiring a new employee are a few examples of business processes.  These processes often require people from different functional specialities to work together.

Warboys et al. (1999) lists a number of definitions of an organisations process:

• A set of partially ordered activities aimed at a particular business goal that creates value to the customer
• A process has clear inputs and outputs and use resources in order to perform the required activities

Organisations are becoming more and more process oriented because the way the process is performed makes a significant difference to the organisation.  The difference may be in terms of the quality and the cost of the service provided, or the product produced.

We can look at an organisation by describing it as a series of interrelated processes. This business process view of the organisation has recently gained popularity because it focuses attention on how the organisation actually accomplishes its tasks and coordinates work.  It is believed to encourage organisations to be more customer-oriented and more action oriented than the traditional functional approach.  Organisations can focus on designing processes that cut across functional lines and that deliver greater service and value to the customer.

1.1 Systems & Business Process

A system may consist of subsystems.  An organisation can be thought of one system consisting of a number of subsystems.  Each sub system can be further divided into smaller subsystems.  Some of the smaller subsystems are information systems that help people to do their work.  Each subsystem in a business organisation is a business process.

2. What is a MODEL?

Models are representations, expressed in some modelling medium, of something of interest.  It is an abstraction of the subject modelled.  The purpose of creating a model is to study certain features of the subject.  Thus, a model will emphasise certain properties of the subject by including them in the model, and suppress others by omitting them.  What properties are included and what are omitted depend on the purpose of the model (Warboys et al., 1999).

3. Process Modelling

Every organisation has a number of processes that it carries out in order to achieve its business objectives; for example:

• handling orders for goods
• recruiting staff
• designing new products
• making investment decisions

Each process is some kind of activity within the organisation where people work together to achieve some desired outcome.

Some essential features we observe in processes are:

• A process involves activity: people and/or machines do things
• A process also generally involves more than one person or machine: a process is about groups; it concerns collaborative activity
• A process has a goal: it is intended to achieve something.

A ‘process’ is not the same as a ‘function’.  Parts of the organisation which have responsibilities, staff and resources are functions, for example: manufacturing, finance, credit control, goods inwards.  These are not processes, though they might take part in processes.

Looking at an organisation as a business we can make a model of the organisation representing it as a network of interrelated processes.  Each process will take one or more inputs and produce one or more outputs.  Some kind of processing will be carried on the inputs to produce the outputs.  There may also be other resources used in order to carry out the necessary processing.

Within process modelling there are many methods and notations that may be used in order to describe the process under scrutiny.  These methods range from formal (mathematical) rigorous notations, to more graphical (easier to understand) notations.

Each of these kinds of notations has its advantages and problems.  Typically formal notations, may be executed on a computer and run (as programs) to study in detail the behaviour of processes, we call them executable models.

Diagrammatic or graphical notations are excellent for process elicitation and presentation, since they may be understood with relative ease in a short space of time.

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Reference(s)
	Book		Alter, S. (1999) Information Systems: A Management Perspective. 3rd Edition. Pearson Education - Addison-Wesley: United States of America (USA), Massachusetts (MA), Suffolk, Boston. [ISBN: 9780201521085]. [Available on: Amazon: https://amzn.to/3z9oO05].
	Book		Warboys, B., Kawalek, P., Robertson, I. & Greenwood, M. (1999) Business Information Systems: A Process Approach. McGraw-Hill Education: United States of America (USA), New York (NY). [ISBN: 9780077094645]. [Available on: Amazon: https://amzn.to/3TnV07T].

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Reference (or cite) Article
	Kahlon, R. S. (2012) Business Process Modelling [Online]. dkode: United Kingdom, England, London. [Published on: 2012-03-18]. [Article ID: RSK666-0000040]. [Available on: dkode | Ravi - https://ravi.dkode.co/2012/03/business-process-modelling.html].

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