For example, the four work activities Order Associate Classifies Order, Account Specialist Creates Customer Account, Financial Analyst Analyzes Customer’s Credit, and Credit Specialist Contact Customer are a workflow in the Order Fulfillment process.Ī business process then, simply defined, is the end-to-end set of work activities and associated workflows.ġ0 Business Process Modeling Best Practicesĭo not try to analyze a business process or suggest ideas for improving a business process while you are trying to understand and map the current-state of a business process. Reviews Order for Acceptance, etc.Ī “workflow” is a sequence of work activities that result in an end point in the process. For example, some of the work activities in the Order Fulfillment process (see process map below) are Order Associate Classifies Order, Account Specialist Creates Customer Account, Sales Mgr. Work activities are where the actual work of the process is performed. There are two core components of a business process – work activities and workflow.Ī “work activity” is a cohesive unit of work performed by an actor (person or system) that transforms inputs into outputs in accordance with a set of business rules (formal or informal). Note: for the purpose of this post the term process model and process map are used interchangeably.

However, modeling a business process, both current state and future state, is essential to the successful analysis of business processes. The focus of this blog is on that core set of best practices for modeling business processes, not on analyzing business process – that is the subject of an upcoming blog post. My experience is that there are a core set of business process modeling best practices that apply regardless of industry, business function or type of organization.

I have created hundreds of current-state and future-state business process models across pretty much every industry, business function and type of organization (public companies, private sector, government).

Business process modelling steps