The System Is Made Up of Processes


Pretty much all the standards concerning work flow and collaboration agree that work flow is made up of processes. However, the standards assume that all processes are information-related processes.

Because a great deal of the original work on business process management, business process engineering, and just-in-time manufacturing concerned the physical movement of goods along with the alignment of business processes, it seems necessary to bring that viewpoint back and put business process in the broader context of processes.

Business Process Is One of the Fundamental Types of Processes in a Business

Of all the processes that typically occur in a commercial enterprise, six are fundamentally distinct in the type and treatment of raw materials and human input. These are semantically valid distinctions because they allow us to ask appropriate questions and execute specific behaviors against them, depending on what their type is. For example, we might ask of a conversion process what its yield is, where it would not make sense to try to evaluate the yield of a personal service.

In an organization, these processes are taken on with an intent that each will help achieve the aim of the organization. For most commercial organizations, this includes making a profit. Most organizations engage in some constellation of activities on a fairly repetitive basis, and they have another set of activities that they do on a much more infrequent basis. Most attempts at improving a business (whether they are the old-fashioned "efficiency studies," "process reengineering," or "supply chain management") all involve attempts to eliminate, combine, or improve the efficiency of these processes.

Process

We refer to process as activities carried out intentionally within an organization (Figure 3.8). This is an abstract category (more on categories later), but it makes it convenient to talk about things that cover all the subcategories.[8]

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Figure 3.8: Primary types of business processes.

Extraction

By extraction, I refer to activities where the raw material is in nature. These include mining, oil and gas drilling, farming, fishing, and hydroelectric and solar power generation. These processes are at the beginning of all supply chains.

Conversion

Conversion is a generic term referring to changing a physical material from one form to another. It includes all manufacturing operations (smelting, extruding, cutting, milling, bending, welding, plating, assembling, etc.), as well as construction activity and fossil fuel power generation.

Transportation

Transportation consists of activities involved in physically moving goods, or electricity, from place to place without converting them. This includes transportation via truck, rail, ship, air freight, pipelines, and power lines, as well as intraplant movements such as conveyors and cranes. Power distribution and communication infrastructure are included in this category.

Facility Services

Facility services are services performed on a building, or occasionally other physical property, such as cleaning, guarding, landscaping, preventive maintenance, and so on.

Personal Services

Personal services are activities in which the raw material is another person, including haircutting, health care, travel, and entertainment.

Information Processes

Information processes use information or intellectual property as primary inputs and outputs. These include traditional data-processing tasks, as well as professional services such as selling, advertising, financial services, consulting, and design. Most of the internal processes in a business, such as data entry, scheduling, approving, and routing, are information processes.

[8]U.S. Census Bureau, "North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)." Available at http://www.census.gov/epcd/www/naics.html.




Semantics in Business Systems(c) The Savvy Manager's Guide
Semantics in Business Systems: The Savvy Managers Guide (The Savvy Managers Guides)
ISBN: 1558609172
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2005
Pages: 184
Authors: Dave McComb

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