In your organization, your employees perform work processes on a daily basis. Even if these work processes are not formally defined, your employees will probably have a lot of knowledge and experience. The activities within a work process consist of manual or automated tasks. Ultimately, your work process will provide a product or service to an internal or external customer.
After describing and modelling your business processes, the possibility arises to make these processes more efficient. The standard method such as “Lean Management” removes waste, the unnecessary or duplicate operations. Lean Six Sigma (LSS) improves your processes by standardizing and continuously measuring. This concerns both the lead time and the quality of your services or products.
Continuous improvement of your business processes, or “Business Process Management” (BPM), is a quality tool. The PDCA improvement circle of W.E.Deming (Plan-Do-Check-Act) is known to be applied more unconsciously implicitly than consciously explicitly. The check and act lead to a new version of the work process. An extended circle indicates the steps that process analysts use in the process lifecycle.
Linear business process
A business process has one or more actors, employees who carry out activities in the process. Business processes are repeated by the actors and may have more or less variations in the execution. These variations are also described as exceptions. Connecting the activities of the various actors prevents waiting times. If the entire process proceeds without waiting times, there is talk of an efficient workflow.
Case Management
If there are many variations in the execution of the work process and the process is not linear but unpredictable, a “Case Management” approach is often chosen. The activities are carried out around an object, a file, to which more and more information is added. In the end, the file has a status transition to “ready”.
Chain processes
Many products and services are created through cooperation between partners in a network. In order for this to work well, it is important that processes are well connected to the chain partners. The automated exchange of information at the right time between the different chain processes ensures an efficient course.