Is the organization commercial, non-profit or state, its main purpose is to create products and services that are of value to the consumer. The goals of the organization are achieved through the conscious management of business processes. This should be all the goals of the organization. The essence of strategic planning is to determine the main vectors of the organization's development and indicators of its activity for a certain time period, identifying the desired result of its activity as a whole. “Within the framework of strategic planning, a comprehensive justification of the problems that an enterprise may encounter is provided, and actions to resolve them are determined, and a concrete management plan (strategy) is developed to fulfill the enterprise’s mission and achieve its stated goals.”
Organization is a system embodied in a real model. A well-functioning model must be consistent, fast, synchronized, and economical. To build such models, you need to use certain action algorithms, which are called business processes. “A business process is a logical sequence of actions of a person (or several people) in a team.” A business process exists only as long as it has a person. If any process or algorithm is carried out by an automated system or computer program, it becomes a technological process. The business process involves people in various forms, levels of involvement and responsibility.
Suppose a person works alone (for example, a musician), he still has people involved in his business process (for example, a recording studio) and potential consumers (listeners). Nothing exists in a “vacuum” - in the same way a single musician has people who are directly a factor in influencing his work. In this case, it is a recording studio and potential listeners. These people in one way or another have an impact on the business process. For further progress on the topic, it is necessary to consider the concept of "business process" in more detail.
“A business process is an aggregate sequence of actions for converting resources received at the input into a final product of value to the consumer at the output.” “A business process is a clear, written-in algorithm for performing certain activities.” Business processes are necessary for visualizing the actions taking place within the organization, for depicting the real areas of responsibility of workers, for identifying potential weak segments of the enterprise, for a detailed systematization and standardization of work processes and improving decision-making. Business processes are present in any organization, sometimes they are documented, which brings a huge leap in quality, and sometimes not, which is a bad sign in the framework of the development of the organization, since the ability to work on process efficiency disappears. The organization in most cases is considered as a set of units, each of which performs certain functions, but the process approach has its advantages. Consideration of the enterprise from the point of view of the process approach allows us to divide the organization into two parts - the main and supporting. In addition, we can distinguish the managerial part and the part responsible for the development development.
Figure 1.1 - Graphical interpretation of the hierarchy of business processes
“Core business processes are processes that directly create value.” “Supporting processes are processes without which basic business processes cannot exist, business processes provide diverse resources.” Other description processes do not require. Let's go a little deeper. A business process can be divided into segments that it contains:
- the purpose of the reason the business process exists;
- Responsible person who carries out the process;
- resource potential, necessary resources for the process;
- performance and quality indicators;
- finiteness, there must be a clear understanding of when the process begins and when it ends.
The combination of basic and supporting business processes aimed at transforming raw materials and information into a final product is called a value stream. The stream of value creation for clarity and practicality is customarily depicted graphically as a diagram or map of business processes. A business process map is a graphical visualization of a business process in the form of a diagram or flowchart. “The concept of“ value stream ”may be new in your vocabulary. The value stream is all the actions (both adding and not adding value) that are necessary to guide the product through the following main workflows. ” Below is an example of a value stream. The card allows you to holistically consider the totality of all business processes, identify bottlenecks, interconnection and potential opportunities for improving efficiency.
Figure 1.2 - Value stream
The flow starts from the consumer’s request and goes to the feedstock - in other words, these are several processes that, one by one, bring useful qualities and a certain value to the consumer. In general, everything is easy and simple. What else do you need to know about business processes? They can be divided into the tasks to which they relate. For the tasks that they solve. It follows from this that there can be any number of varieties of business processes; we single out the main ones:
- Search processes are processes that involve research, generating an idea, searching for models and methods of organization development.
- The design process is unique and may not be repeated, for example, the development of a website or the introduction of new standards.
- An information process is a process that provides information that takes various forms from the exchange of information to conclude a transaction to the exchange of ideas on work processes.
- Production process - a constantly repeating process of the same type at different time periods to create a product or service.
Figure 1.3 - Types of business processes
For a more detailed consideration of the essence of business processes, it is necessary to introduce the concept of the life cycle of a business process. The life cycle of a business process is the passage of four main stages, each of which is characterized by a set of specific actions that are aimed at the business process at this stage. The life cycle of a business process is as follows.
Figure 1.4 - The life cycle of a business process
- Stage "Design" - the development or change of a business process that fits into the strategic goals of the organization.
- Stage “Implementation” - implementation and operation of a business process in an organization, monitoring compliance with performance indicators.
- Stage "Control" - the measurement of performance indicators to analyze the compliance of the process with its tasks.
- Stage “Analysis” - changing and adapting a business process to a real work process to increase its efficiency.
Proceeding from this, it follows that a business process can be managed at each stage of the life cycle, it is only necessary to develop a management tool and choose the one that is suitable for improving key characteristics. “Improving business processes is a combination of methods and approaches that give enterprise managers the opportunity to increase their work efficiency. As the name of the procedure, which is also sometimes called business process management, its goal is to improve business processes, which helps to make them more efficient. "
Improving the business process at the “Design” stage consists of such stages as:
- strategic planning, compliance of the business process with strategic goals, designing long-term business processes that can adapt to new technologies without loss of time and quality;
- transformation planning, a clear step-by-step plan for changing or developing a business process, indicating the deadline and the necessary actions to implement the plan.
Improving the business process at the “Implementation” stage consists of such stages as:
- detailed description of the business process;
- Description of indicators for assessing the effectiveness of a business process;
- implementation of a business process;
- monitoring and analysis of the compliance of the business process with indicators;
- organizational change management.
Improving the business process at the “Control” stage consists of such stages as analysis and control of the business process. It came out short. Improving the business process at the “Analysis” stage consists of such stages as:
- performance monitoring;
- identification of bottlenecks and weaknesses;
- collection of information, further transformation and improvement;
- performance reporting;
- making decisions on making adjustments.
Based on this, it follows that in order to improve and increase the value created by the business process, business processes must be constantly monitored and analyzed. For successful monitoring and analysis, business processes must be described and modeled. Description and modeling can take various forms from frankly abstract to incredibly designed and detailed. But more about that another time.