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• users can determine the status of business activities and business
• specialists can monitor the activity and identify potential improve-
ments to the business process definition.
10.1 Process
A process is an ordering of activities with a beginning and an end; it has
inputs (in terms of resources, materials, and information) and a specified out-
put (the results it produces). We may thus define a process as any sequence of
steps that is initiated by an event; transforms information, materials, or com-
mitments; and produces an output. A business process is typically associ-
ated with operational objectives and business relationships, for example, an
insurance claims process or an engineering development process. A process
may be wholly contained within a single organizational unit or may span
different organizations, such as in a customer-supplier relationship. Typical
examples of processes that cross organizational boundaries are purchasing
and sales processes jointly set up by buying and selling organizations, sup-
ported by EDI and value-added networks. The Internet is now a trigger for
the design of new business processes and the redesign of existing ones.
A business process is a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve
a well-defined business outcome. A (business) process view implies a hori-
zontal view of a business organization and looks at processes as sets of
interdependent activities designed and structured to produce a specific
output for a customer or a market. A business process defines the results
to be achieved, the context of the activities, the relationships between the
activities, and the interactions with other processes and resources. A busi-
ness process may receive events that alter the state of the process and the
sequence of activities. A business process may produce events for input to
other applications or processes. It may also invoke applications to perform
computational functions, and it may post assignments to human work lists
to request actions by human actors. Business processes can be measured,
and different performance measures apply, like cost, quality, time, and cus-
tomer satisfaction.
A business process has the following behavior:
• It may contain defined conditions triggering its initiation in each
new instance (e.g., the arrival of a claim) and defined outputs at its
completion.
• It may involve formal or relatively informal interactions between
participants.
• It has a duration that may vary widely.
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