COEPD – Center of Excellence for Professional Development Happy Learning
Business process modelling is the activity of representing the processes of an organization so that the current processes can be analysed and improved. These processes are modelled in a visual format so that procedures can be communicated in a simple, standardized format which everyone can understand.
Benefits of Business process modelling – a. Convey how processes work so that everyone is on the same page.
- Gets rid of any redundancies or non-essential information
- Provides a clear picture of the process with a start and end
- In some cases, a fringe benefit of Process modelling are functional requirements. Since functional requirements describe what the system needs to do, and doing something is a process, when we model processes we often end up with functional requirements as a side benefit.
Some ways to represent process models are via Gantt charts, flow charts, Pert diagrams, etc and the most common tools used to create process models are UML and BPMN.
Since business processes are central to process modelling, let us examine them in detail,
Business Process – A collection of activities designed to produce a specific output for a customer. Business process focus on the how work is done instead of what. These activities also provide a sequential flow providing a chronological understanding of the process.
A business process,
- Has a goal
- Has specific inputs
- Has specific outputs
- Uses resources
- Has a number of activities performed in a sequential order
- Creates value of some kind to the customer.
