Business Process

According to Davenport, a business process is a structured set of activities designed to produce a specific output (Davenport, 1993). For Hammer and Champy (1993), a process is defined as “a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer. A business process has a goal and is affected by events occurring in the external world or in other processes."

Smimov argues about a modern business process to be seen as a distributed system where its activities are performed by various employees, on different locations, using a heterogeneous set of IT systems. A business process typically crosses the borders of organisational departments and even companies (Smimov, 2012).

Business process can be modelled. To this end, (Smimov, 2012) defines business process models as key artefacts to represent how work is performed in organisations. These models can help an organisation to document, evaluate, or improve their business processes.

References:

Davenport, T.H. (1993), Process Innovation, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA.

Hammer, M., and Champy, J. (1993). Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution Harper Business.

Smirnov, S., Reijers, H., Weske, M., and Nugteren, T.. (2012), Business process model abstraction: a definition, catalog, and survey, J Distributed and Parallel Databases, V 30, N 1, p. 63-99.



Variants

  • Business process modelling
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