Definitions of terms used in Business Process Management

What is Business Process Management?

BPM (Business Process Management) is a discipline to analyze, design, implement, control and continuously improve processes.

This approach includes strategies, objectives, culture, organizational structures, roles, policies, methods and IT tools to enable the organization to be managed through processes.

The processes are identified 🔍, documented 📝, driven 👨‍✈️ and optimized ✔️ in order to increase their efficiency (best results at the best cost), agility (capacity for self-organization and adaptation), and robustness.

What is a process?

[ISO 9000:2015 definition] Set of interrelated or interacting activities that use inputs to deliver an intended result

[Simplified definition] A process is a set of activities that transforms inputs into outputs.

What is a procedure or workflow?

A procedure or workflow is a specified way to carry out an activity or a process.

What are the 3 main categories of processes?

Generally, the processes are classified into three large families.

  1. Operational processes are at the heart of the business, and they produce the added value.
  2. Support processes are necessary for the execution of operational processes, and therefore they indirectly bring value to the organization.
  3. Management or decision-making or quality processes are not directly essential for the operations but they reflect the ability to meet quality and performance requirements in an organization. These are usually performed by the leadership and the management.

What is a resource?

A resource 🧰 is an informational, financial or material means produced by other internal or external actions. Unlike an input, a resource is not transformed during the actions.

What is an actor?

An actor 🧑 is a person, an organizational entity or an application that is responsible for carrying out one or more actions of the process. The actor can be internal or external to the organization, and can collaborate with other actors to achieve the objective of the process.

What is a result?

The completion of an action produces a result ✅, which is a partial or final realization, converging to the objective of the process. The result of an action can be either an event, a resource, or an input to another action.

What is an event?

An indicator 🌡️ is a piece of information or a set of information making it possible to highlight a situation, a result or an evolution in an objective manner.

What is an indicator?

An event 🔔 is something that happens and that influences the course of an action. It could be a trigger for a process to start. There is no work on an event, therefore an event consumes no resources, and produces no results.

What are the main activities in Business Process Management?

There are 5 key activities for process continuous improvement.

  • Modeling, which means documenting and visually representing a process model. It is the basis of the following activities but it is also a real opportunity to document and capitalize on the practical knowledge and know-how of the organization by clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the collaborators.
  • Analyzing, which is about understanding and evaluating the performance of a process based on relevance, effectiveness and efficiency.
  • Optimizing or transforming to make changes in the process.
  • Implementing the improved process in the organization and its information system.
  • And finally driving the process by monitoring the execution and following the intended results.

What is process mapping?

Process mapping is the activity of visually connecting processes together with the goal of gaining a clear understanding of how a specified area of operations work.

A block diagram is often used to perform the process mapping, each block representing a process.

The term “process mapping” is also often used to refer to workflow mapping.

What is workflow mapping?

Workflow mapping is the activity of visually describing the series of actions that enable the completion of a given process.

The workflow mapping for a given process corresponds to the Workflows / Sub-Processes block in the Business Process Canvas.

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