Intro

Question 1

What are the 4 most typical processes in organizations. Provide an example for each

Answer 1

• Quote to cash: Request quote from customer to himself receiving and paying the product or service
• Procure to pay: Client counterpart of quote to cash
• Issue to resolution: complaint about a defect in a product
• Application to approval: Application for building permits or business licenses

Question 2

What are the 5 key ingredients of business processes?

Answer 2

Events:
- Passive process elements that happen atomically and thus have no duration (e.g., “RfQ received”)
- May trigger the execution of an activity (or a series of activities)

Activities:
- Active process elements (e.g., “prepare quote”) that are time-consuming and resource-demanding
- Can refer to both a fine-grained unit of work performed by a single person (task) and a coarse-grained work unit

Decision points:
- Points in time when a decision is made that affects the way the process is executed (e.g., “accept vs. decline quote”)

Actors:
- Include humans (e.g., warehouse clerk), organizations (e.g., supplier), and software systems (e.g., ERP system)
- Internal actors operate inside the organization where the process is executed (process participants) vs. External actors
- The internal or external actor who consumes the process output is called the customer (e.g., an internal manager)

Objects:
- Physical objects (e.g., equipment, materials, products, paper documents)
- Informational objects (e.g., electronic documents and records)

Question 3

What’s a business process?

Answer 3

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 4

What’s BPM?

Answer 4

Business process management (BPM):
A body of methods, techniques, and tools to identify, discover, analyze, redesign, execute, and monitor business processes in order to optimize their performance.

Question 5

What are some BPM-related disciplines?

Answer 5

• Total Quality Management (TQM)
• Operations Management (OM)
• Lean
• Six Sigma

Question 6

What’s the role for:
- Management team
- Process Owners
- Process participants

Answer 6

Management team:
- Includes the board of managers (CEO, CFO, COO, CIO, HR director, etc.)
- May also include a dedicated Chief Process Officer (CPO) or the like
Process owners

Process Owners:
- Responsible for the efficient and effective operation of a given process
- Involved in all BPM lifecycle phases from process discovery/modeling to monitoring

Process participants:
- Human actors who perform process activities on a day-to-day basis
- Involved in process discovery and analysis (as domain experts)

Question 7

What’s the role for:
- Process Analysts
- Process methodologist
- System engineers
- BPM Group

Answer 7

Process Analysts:
- Conduct process identification, discovery, analysis, and redesign activities; as well as
coordinate process implementation and monitoring
- Have either a business or an IT background (if concerned with process automation)

Process methodologist:
- Provides expert knowledge to process analysts (including coordination of technical trainings)

System engineers:
- Involved in process redesign and implementation
- Capture system requirements and translate them into a system design

BPM group:
- Responsible for maintaining the process architecture, prioritizing process redesign projects,
giving support to process owners and/or process analysts, ensuring that the documentation
of individual processes is up-to-date and maintained in a consistent manner, etc.
- Process methodologist
- System engineers
- BPM Group

Question 8

Draw the BPM Lifecycle and describe its components

Answer 8

Check notes