Process
From Wikiexpert
Contents |
See also
- Business_Logic
- YAWL - Yet Another Workflow Language
- BPEL - Business Process Execution Language
- Workflow patterns
Old notes
In the nodal model the word "process" refers to the organisational context (business process or procedure), not to CPU processes.
A business process is a set of linked activities that create value by transforming an input into a more valuable output. Both input and output can be artefacts and/or information and the transformation can be performed by humans, machines, or both.
There are three types of business processes:
- Management processes - the processes that govern the operation. Typical management processes include "Corporate Governance" and "Strategic Management".
- Operational processes - these processes create the primary value stream, they are part of the core business. Typical operational processes are Purchasing, Manufacturing, Marketing, and Sales.
- Supporting processes - these support the core processes. Examples include Accounting, Recruitment, IT-support.
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.
Activities are parts of the business process that do not include any decision making and thus are not worth decomposing (although decomposition would be possible), such as "Answer the phone", "produce an invoice".
A business process is usually the result of a business process design or business process reengineering activity. Business process modeling is used to capture, document and reengineer business processes. To visualize a business process, one of the graphical notations can be used such as Business Process Modeling Notation.
Defining processes
A process definition must specify sequences of actions, acts or operations which have to be executed in the same manner in order to obtain always the same result in the same circumstances (for example, emergency procedures). Less precisely speaking, this word can indicate a sequence of activities, tasks, steps, decisions, calculations and processes, that when undertaken in the sequence laid down produces the described result, product or outcome. A procedure usually induces a change.
Business Process Mapping refers to activities involved in defining exactly what a business entity does, who is responsible, to what standard a process should be completed and how the success of a business process can be determined. Once this is done, there can be no uncertainty as to the requirements of every internal business process.
ISO 9001 requires a business entity to follow a process approach when managing its business, and to this end creating business process maps will assist. The entity can then work towards ensuring its processes are effective (the right process is followed the first time), and efficient (continually improved to ensure processes use the least amount of resources).
Identification
In an organisation, all roles and resources have unique identification so that processes can be described in terms of these role and resources and what sequences they must occur in. The processes themselves also have unique identification so that small processes can be components of larger processes.
In the nodal model all processes, resources and roles are nodes whose globally unique identification is handled by Identity, one of the fundamental nodal organisations. The processes are defined in terms of roles, but at runtime the role-instance (actor) being referred to is filled by either a human or a function, depending on the scale of operation and the nature of the process. The processes order of execution is defined by the geometric structure of the nodes rather than by language syntax, and the interpreter of this structure is the nodal reduction algorithm.
