Business Process Modeling Tools

January 19, 2009

Business Process Modeling Tools are used to create business process models, process flow models, and data flow models.

Popular Business Process Modeling Tools

Business Process Modeling Example:

As we know, a business process modeling is a collection or group of related activities or business processes that produce a specific service or product.

Business Process Modeling Example

In order to explain a Business process modeling in a simple manner, let us assume an activity of getting a seat in a college.

• To obtain a seat in a college, first the applicant need to submit an application along with GRE and TOEFL scores, school mark sheets, birth certificate, payments etc. In Business process modeling, these are represented as input s with arrows pointing inwards.
• In order to process the application, college should have computing systems; employees, accounting systems etc., and mechanism arrows represent these.
• The application should only be approved upon satisfying several factors like; legal requirements, government rules, valid mark sheets etc. and control arrows represent these.
• When all processes are completed, the applicant will be notified of the selection, scholarships, books etc and output arrows represent these.
• Thus the diagram mentioned provides a clear picture of the activities to join in a college and the information related with that activity.

Ref: www.learndatamodeling.com

Posted in General No Comments »

Business Process Modeling

January 19, 2009

A business process modeling is a collection or group of related activities or business processes that produce a specific service or product. Business processes are visually represented as diagrams of simple box with arrow graphics and text labels, better known as Business Process Models.

Business Process Modeling Overview:

Business Process Modeling(IDEF0) is the first step in Business Modeling and it is followed by Process Flow Modeling(IDEF3) and Data Flow Diagrams(DFD). In Business Process Modeling, an organization’s functions are represented by using boxes and arrows. Here boxes represent activities and arrows represent the information associated with an activity. Input arrow, Output arrow, Mechanism arrow and Control arrow are the different types of arrows that are used in business process modeling.

The business process modeling is started with a context diagram and it provides a brief overview about the organization’s activity. In order to understand the activities of an organization in a detailed manner, the context diagram is then decomposed into many sub activities diagrams.

Similarly decomposition of context diagram is done in process flow modeling and data flow diagrams. Context diagram is similar to a conceptual data model in data modeling. The following example gives the layout of the context diagram.

Ref: www.learndatamodeling.com

Posted in Business, Technology No Comments »

Business Process Re-engineering

January 17, 2009

Quite often it is necessary for an organization to revise and re-examine it’s decisions, goals, targets etc., in order to improve the performance in many ways and this activity of re-engineering is called as Business Process Re-engineering which is also known as Business Process Re-design or Business Process Improvement.

Analyzing present business process diagrams, process flow diagrams(work flow diagrams) and data flow diagrams may lead to success in business process re-engineering since these diagrams are very powerful in visualizing the activities, processes and data flow of an organization.

Business Process Re-engineering Examples

The entire organization’s business processes or an individual department’s business processes can be re-engineered according to the needs of an organization.

For example, a bank may have many activities associated with it like investing, credit cards, loans, etc., and they may be involved in cross selling(e.g. insurance) with other preferred vendors in the market. If the credit card department is not functioning in an efficient manner as the way the bank expected, it might re-engineer the “credit card” business process.

In this situation, bank may think about decreasing the interest rate, offering promotion, redemption, balance transfers etc., to the customers in order to facilitate the performance. This would lead to re-engineer or re-design the current bank’s credit card process. The net effect is the improvement in performance of credit card division and conversely, if anything goes wrong, major losses are also expected.

Computer system’s infrastructure, competition, financial strength, expenses reduction, customer satisfaction, product quality, better management, employees involvement are some of the areas that an organization is interested to do business process re-engineering and change the existing processes.

Project Infrastructure

An organization may migrate from X database to Y database for better performance, storage capabilities and reliability.

Competition

An organization may buy a new and sophisticated application in order to overcome the competitive pressure.

Financial strength

Many small and big companies need money to expand their business and in this situation, they may get loans, or issue shares etc.

Product Quality

A calling card distributor may buy good calling cards from the vendors that are good in quality, time and easy connection.

Posted in Business 2 Comments »

Business Process Management

January 15, 2009

Business Process Management, a set of activities, is essential for a new or existing business in a way that it helps an organization to optimize current business processes and future organizational and operational changes.

Business process management is done with the help of different tools that help in capturing, modeling, designing, integrating, deploying, testing, measuring and maintaining several business activities. The success or failure of each company depends on how good or bad it is able to manage the entire life cycle of its processes.

Need for Business Process Management:

• To plan for a new business or for a new change in the business.
• To avoid the common mistakes that happens in a project.
• To document business processes in a common language to help IT and non-IT team members.
• To draw business modeling and data modeling diagrams and to capture business rules in a way we want them.
• To implement enterprise architecture or enterprise integration architecture (EAI) or ETL architecture.
• To measure data by using business intelligence tools.
• To enhance business to business transactions.

Advantages of Business Process Management (BPM):

BPM Models:

• BPM’s activities like Modeling, Automating, Monitoring, Analyzing, and improving the business processes helps an organization to get good profits in less time.
• BPM’s business process models visualize the activities within the organization and business-to-business transactions.
• BPM’s process flow models visualize the process flows within the organization and business-to-business transactions and the relationships between process flow.
• BPM’s data flow models visualize the data flow within the organization and business-to-business transactions.
• BPM’s decomposition diagrams for business process modeling, process flow diagrams and data flow diagrams visualize the processes and activities in a detailed manner.

Workflow:

• BPM’s workflow helps to define, create, execute, automate and manage processes within the organization and business-to-business-transactions to get more productivity.

Documentation:

• The entire business process procedures can be documented in a shared multi user repository. This provides technical and non-technical persons to understand the different processes that occur in each departments of the organization, its performance and the outcome of each business processes.

Quality:

• BPM increases quality and quantity of a product or a service provided by the organization.

Reports:

• BPM reports can be very useful to the topmost executives of an organization and whoever needs it.

Resources:

• BPM reduces the working hours of the employees.

Exceptions:

• BPM reduces the errors and exceptions when compared to a manual process.

Regulations:

• BPM helps an organization to abide by the regulations of the government.

Business-to-Business Transactions (B2B):

• BPM is the core of B2B transactions to gain leverage with vendors, customers, consumers, and suppliers.

Competition:

• Provides significant competitive advantage over competitors.

Simulation:

• Simulation techniques with different scenarios can be used on business processes to explore the effect of change.

Posted in Business, Technology No Comments »