Business Process

Review of Major Points Business Processes Introductory Lecture I

So, what did we learn?

1. The concept of a process is required for Interpreting tangible and/or intangible occurrences. We can observe these usually as set of activities executed in time and space to make sense of our surroundings.

2. The orderly execution of these activities as a series of steps in time and space can be encapsulated in what we refer to as a process.

3. Overall, processes describing occurrences or some planned action can be developed at different levels of abstraction.

4. When a process occurs some change almost always occurs; id est inputs are manipulated by the steps in the process and are converted to outputs.

5. There is a strong relationship between a process and measurement insofar that measurement tells us that a change has or is occurring and therefore some form of process is involved.

6. Business processes serve the organisation. For the organisation to survive one of their fundamental functions is to help make the organisation profitable.

7. A business process must add value to its input during the transformation. The value proposition to the customers is an important feature of strategy.

8. The need for “Profitability”, determined by the purpose and type of organisation the business process serves determines the shape of the business process.

9. There are some common “commercial functions” that are executed through well-defined business processes. Purchasing, Production or Service provision, Sales, Administration, etc.

10. Products or services can either be standardised or customised. Processes that produce standardised goods can be made extremely efficient. Processes that produce customised goods can benefit from the optimisation of the process environment which should facilitate as much as possible process change.

11. A process is a series of steps, with a clearly defined beginning and end, with distinct...