Business processes

Question 1

What are business processes?

Answer 1

A business process is a collection of inter-related events,
activities, and decision points that involve a number of
actors and objects, which collectively lead to an outcome
that is of value to at least one customer.

Question 2

What is Business Process Management (BPM)?

Why is it needed?

Answer 2

Business Process Management (BPM) is the art and
science of overseeing how work is performed in an
organization to ensure consistent outcomes and to take
advantage of improvement opportunities.

Improvement (depending on an organization’s objectives)
꞊ reducing costs, execution times, or error rates
꞊ gaining competitive advantage through innovation
Improvement initiatives are:
• on-off or continuous
• incremental or radical

Question 3

What methods are used for BPM?

Answer 3

BPM
•Total Quality Management (TQM),
• embraces the principles and techniques of operations
management, Lean and Six Sigma,
• combines them with capabilities offered by modern IT,

Question 4

What is the Business Process Reengineering (BPR)?

Answer 4

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the
fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business
processes to achieve dramatic improvement in critical,
contemporary measures of performance, such as cost,
quality, service, and speed

BPR is a management concept urging managers to look at entire, end-to-endprocesses when trying to improve the operations of their businesses:

Question 5

Process thinking aspects

Answer 5

• Workers focus - “single part of a process for a single product
• Workers capabilities - “Pure specialist”

Question 6

Problems of process rethinking

Answer 6

• Concept misuse: Projects were labeled BPR, even when business processes were not the
  core, but aimed, e.g., just for reduction of workforce instead.
  • Over-radicalism: “Don’t Automate, Obliterate” (Many situations require a much more gradual
  (incremental) approach.)
  • Support immaturity: tools/technologies not yet available/insufficient  much process logic
  had to be hard-coded in IT applications of the time  efforts on redesigning a process were
  thwarted by a rigid infrastructure  people grew frustrated

Question 7

BPM software tools

Answer 7

• Process modelling tools
• Process analysis tools
• BPM tools/systems/suites
• Workflow management systems