Business process: analysis of business processes. Description, application, results

2024 Author: Howard Calhoun | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 10:16

Any entrepreneur needs to know at least indirectly what a business process is. Business process analysis helps to reduce costs, increase profitability and ultimately increase the profit of the enterprise. In the economic literature, this concept is first encountered in the works of researchers in the 80s of the last century. It was then that in the United States for the first time they thought that the efficiency of all production depends on a set of interrelated actions called a business process.

Definitions

Business process is a complex concept. Business development is highly dependent on interrelated operations, procedures and activities. It is impossible to imagine a plant without the supply of raw materials, their processing, workers at the machines and accountants. An enterprise is a closed system that functions as an integral organism. And for everything to work correctly without hitches and delays, you need a main brain - an experienced manager who will analyze and monitor the coherence of all business processes.

If you look from an economic point of view, then the interconnectedness of all possible activities, during which the processing of environmental resources into the final product for the consumer, is called a business process. Business process analysis is an assessment of the effectiveness of a particular action, operation or event related to production.

What are they for

Describing business processes is pretty easy. But the biggest reality problem is that in any enterprise in our country it is rare to find a person who is really interested in improving the efficiency of various production processes. Small and medium-sized businesses are trying to use long-outdated methods to reduce costs, while in the West they have long understood that the success of a business depends on a competent hired manager who is interested in getting maximum results from his work.

Creating business processes gives a clear understanding: who is responsible for what stage, what position they hold, and what they should do. Such structuring makes the organization of production transparent and makes it easier to manage it. By communicating the tree of goals to employees, you can increase their motivation by demonstrating that their work is aimed at common goals. In addition, organizing a business in this way will help identify unnecessary costs of financial and time resources.

How to create

Regardless of whether the business is large or small, the approach to creating a detailed plan is the same. Considerspecific example. There is a company that sells sofas. The business process diagram is similar to a tree. Main branches host major features that branch into smaller ones. So, what are the main stages of the business process for a retailer?

1. Purchase of goods. This is the first and central business process. What are its sub-stages?

• Supplier analysis.
• Drawing up contracts with manufacturing plants.
• Drawing up contracts with transport companies.

2. Sofa placement. At this stage, there are such moments:

• Selecting a room.
• Construction or rental of premises.
• Creating conditions for sales.

3. Sales process.

• Recruitment.
• Purchasing a cash register.
• Creating atmosphere and design for sales.

4. Marketing and advertising.

• Placement of a sign.
• Create business cards, booklets, brochures, catalogs, etc.
• Ad placement.

The list can be long. It is important to understand how business processes are created. And then we will give a few golden rules for organizing a business to be successful.

Rule 1

A specific person is responsible for each selected business stage. Involve them in the creation of the scheme. This will provide an opportunity to understand the process in more detail, interest employees and increase their motivation aimed at achieving common goals. This is especially important in the early stages of the formation of the enterprise. Starting a business is always associated withhuge difficulties, and the timely setting of goals for specific stages will give a more detailed plan for action.

Rule 2

Use automated programs and visualize your circuits. To date, there are many ready-made programs that help structure information. Small and medium businesses use them everywhere.

If you are working in a group, take a board or pieces of paper to write everything down and draw a tree of your processes as you go along. Start with big operations and break them down into smaller ones. For large enterprises, creating business processes is a huge painstaking work that requires maximum concentration and coordination of actions of all employees.

Rule 3

When formulating business processes, be guided by the strategy of the company, and not by its organizational structure. The same function may go beyond established departments. For example, when delivering goods from a supplier, one can consider the boundary of the business process until the moment the goods leave the trading enterprise itself, that is, when it is placed on the shelves and available to the consumer. This process involves several departments that are part of the organizational structure.

Rule 4

Don't get too detailed in your plan. If you overload the diagram with unnecessary information, this will lead to general confusion and a heavy burden on responsible employees. If you plan to make changes in a particular segment, this part needs to be detailed, and all the rest should be considered.only superficially, without going into details. The efficiency of business processes is subject to the Pareto law "20/80", when 20% of detailed descriptions will bring 80% of the success of the entire operation.

Rule 5

Don't be afraid of the truth and build a scheme based on what really is. This situation occurs very often. The chief manager asks his subordinates about their departments in order to build a business process diagram. Those try and tell how they are doing well. Although in fact the real situation is far from ideal. But on the basis of false data, the wrong scheme will be built, after which inefficient decisions will be made and all the work will go to waste.

Don't confuse "as is", "as it should be" and "as I want it to be". No matter how bad everything is, business processes are compiled precisely in order to improve this state. Therefore, it is imperative to describe only a real-life situation.

Business process automation

Following all the events taking place within the company is very difficult, especially when it comes to large corporations and syndicates. Big business is hard to imagine without a whole system of automated programs that allow you to analyze incoming data to make a decision. Therefore, today very often we are talking about automating business processes.

In practice, this means that there is a special computer program that processes all kinds of information flows that provide a business process. Business process analysis takes place offlinemode, and the person only gets acquainted with the results and draws the appropriate conclusion.

Choice of analysis method

When faced with the question of how best to describe business processes in an automatic way, a domestic entrepreneur will find many options that are not well optimized for the Russian market. Almost all of the proposed software was created for Western companies that have experience in optimizing production. But after analyzing some data, we created our own list of programs that implement the business process.

1. BEST-5 "My business" is a software that is often used by small and medium businesses. The program is available for any computer and is very easy to use. Its advantage is that it can analyze small amounts of data from a small enterprise.
2. Corporate Modeler. Often used in modern enterprises, mainly because it is inexpensive. Starting a business is easy to organize with this program, since it is very convenient to build business process diagrams, but it practically does not analyze.
3. iGrafx Enterprise Central. Very good Canadian design. Can not only recognize and draw up business plans, but also successfully analyze arrays of input data. In our country, it has very little distribution, although the product is very worthy.
4. Business Studio. The most famous Russian development. Integrated with other MS Office products (Word, Excel, Visio). Fordomestic entrepreneur is the best choice in terms of price-result ratio. Excellent business process analysis. Production can be successfully optimized due to the results obtained from the program.

Technology for building business processes

The most common today is the integration of the automatic and manual method of building the "Business Process" scheme. The analysis of business processes in this case is carried out in two stages: the first with the help of the results obtained on a computer, the second - manually by the manager.

Let's consider two main approaches to plotting graphs and charts. In this case, business process technology will be built using the following methods:

1. DFD (Data flow diagramming).
2. WFD (Work Flow Diagram).

The first DFD method involves drawing up a diagram of data flows. They include: detailing the work of the process, responsible employees, necessary documentation. Such a construction gives a complete picture of the company's activities, its surrounding input and output data, all elements of the production process and the relationships between them. This approach allows you to highlight free (extra) business processes that reduce the effectiveness of the result and can be optimized in various ways.

WFD - workflow diagrams that describe lower-level business processes. Business development can change significantly if you know not only the vertical hierarchy of actions, but also the horizontal one. What does this mean?

If you lookclearly, WFD-diagrams are a grid of time frames, each graph of which is responsible for a particular process. Suppose the delivery of goods lasts two days - the graph shows the beginning and end of the process. Then comes the event of product placement on the trading floor, and this process will begin only after the delivery is over. The data is plotted sequentially on the graph. Events, operations and actions can be intertwined if they are performed simultaneously. It is convenient to start developing a business in the early stages in this way, determining how much time is needed for a full production cycle.

Conclusions

For small or big, new or old, you need an understanding of what a business process is. At any stage of the firm's life cycle, optimization of production can significantly affect the further development. After all, the main goal of the existence of any organization today is to satisfy the needs of the consumer. And if the client is satisfied, he will make a profit. The dependence here is directly proportional. The higher the level of consumer satisfaction, the higher the firm's profit. And this can only be achieved by analyzing and then changing the process within the enterprise.