What is Business Process Design?

According to Hammer & Champy, a process is “a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer.”

According to Rummler & Brache “a business process is a series of steps designed to produce a product or service.”

A process is a sequence of steps or instructions that are performed to achieve a desired outcome. Similarly, a business process is a series of steps that are performed to produce a product or service.

For example, when you take your car to a car wash service you enter your car into the service center, the operator records necessary data about you and your car, and then he takes your car to the car wash service area and cleans it.

After all these tasks, you get your car cleaned and maintained. In order to get your car washed you went through an entire process and had the desired outcome. Business process design is the method to comprehend and outline the business activities that help the business to operate effectively.

Process design is responsible for designing a business’ processes to guarantee that they are improved, and operational, meet customer requirements and enhance and manage the development and progress of an organization. Improved efficiency and greater productivity can be achieved by a well-designed process.

The advantages of business process design projects are:

• Improvement in operational performance
• Management of customer and supply chain
• Integration and Automation of business process
• Decrease in cost
• New business opportunities

In these projects business process design normally happens in the early critical phase. The main objective of the project is to implement business change. This change could be to improve business operating businesses, integrate software systems, or both of them.

businesses integrate software systems or both of them. During the process of project improvement, the emphasis of the business process design is on the efficiency of the project. This also includes understanding and measuring the requirements of inefficient activities.

While implementing the project the main concern is to comprehend the processes to be automated and select a suitable technology. The process design activities can be modest to aggressive in both cases.

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Business Process Modelling

In information systems, Business process modeling (BPM) is an activity that represents the processes of an enterprise, to analyze and improve the current process. BPM is usually performed by business experts or managers who wish to improve process efficiency and quality. The involvement of information technology may not be required; however, Information Technology is a common factor in modeling business processes.

BPM concentrate on process, actions, and activities. It is cross-functional, and usually combines the work and documentation of multiple departments in the organization. There might be situations when BPM may also include activities of other organizations’ processes systems that support the primary process. The BPM model is analyzed and represented in more detail in large organizations as compared to smaller organizations.

BPM has various purposes in an organization. These purposes are discussed as follows:

• It is a diagram tool that is used to design process models.
• It improves customer service and experience.
• It reduces time and effort.
• It leads to increased profits.
• It increases competitive advantage and market growth.

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Business Process Reengineering

According to Hamper and Champy, “ business process re-engineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of the business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service, and speed”.

Business process re-engineering (BPR) can be defined as a business management strategy. BPR is a technique that allows us to rethink the fundamentals and redesign the processes of business to achieve rapid improvements. During the BPR, it is kept in mind that performance, cost, and quality are not being compromised.

A business process is a sequence of instructions that are implemented to attain quality in products and services.

BPR helps companies to restructure their organizations by concentrating on the design of their business processes. A business process is a group of logically related tasks which are executed to obtain a pre-defined outcome. The aim of re-engineering is to concentrate on business objectives and processes related to them. It encourages the recreation of processes instead of optimization.

For example, if a person visits a bank to apply for a loan, ATM card, and savings account. In order to perform all these three tasks, most probably he has to go to three different counters. He has to give his personal details and documents to all three counters and probably wait in queue for a long time.

However, the bank can simplify this process by adopting and implementing BPR. The bank can adopt a one-stop shopping approach to this case where all the operations can be handled by a case manager. The case manager accepts the application of the customer and stores it on the network where other team members can access it.

Using this approach all three tasks can be done in a parallel way. After the verification, if the details provided by the customer are incorrect or give an error the application is rejected, else the loan team processes the loan application.

During this process, the case manager instructs the account team to open a saving account and the ATM team to provide an ATM card to the customer. All this can be done without moving to separate counters for documents and signatures. Everything is done at the same time and place.

Business process re-engineering is also known as business process redesign, business transformation, or business process change management. The figure shows the BPR cycle.

In the Figure, the first step identifies the activities that can increase the value of the organization’s current process. Next, it analyses the activities that can provide value to the customer. After that, the new process is designed and tested before the implementation. If the implementation fails, this cycle is performed again until the desired outcome is achieved.