Business Process & BPM with Examples

What is Business Process?

Business process is an activity or group of activities required to achieve the company’s goal or fulfil their business needs. This business process may be department wise or enterprise level wise or for a specific function of a department or an enterprise.

What is Business Process Management? Provide examples?

The enterprise level business processes are complicated since it is spanned across multiple departments and the management of these business processes are called as Business Process Management.

Examples:

1. IT Services Firm – Enterprise Level – Contains many business processes and three important business processes are explained below
   1. Project Implementation Onsite – After Bagging the project
   2. Bench Sales Business Offshore – After Bagging the project
2. Staffing Firm – Enterprise Level – Contains many business processes and two important business processes are explained below
   1. Recruitment Business Process – Sourcing candidates and Placing candidates for requirement
   2. Bench Sales Business Process – Placing their own employees to requirements (Internal or External)
3. Attorney Firm – Enterprise Level – Contains many processes and four important processes are explained below.
   1. H1B work permit Business Process – Obtaining H1B work permit for employees
   2. L1 work permit Business Process – Obtaining H1B work permit for employees
   3. Green Card Business Process – Obtaining green card
   4. Visa Processing Business Process – Obtaining visa processing

Define Business Analyst:

An IT Business Analyst is a person who understands the business needs, creates requirements, business processes, creates documents and provides solutions to the queries asked by the IT team to develop an IT product and to automate the process if necessary.

We will explain the business process, business process management and the duties/responsibilities of a business analyst by taking an example of an attorney firm, which deals with obtaining work permits for their client’s employees all over the world.

To start with, assume that the attorney firm doesn’t have an IT automated process to minimise the work involved in different activities.

US H1B Work Permit Business Process:

Activity 1: The client sends all documents/data to the attorney firm to process work permit for their employee through email

Activity 2:  They verify, validate the data and send it for their client’s review.

Activity 3:  After the review, the attorney firm prepares all Government forms/documents and encloses the data/documents received from the client in an envelope.

Activity 4: The attorney firms ships it to Federal Agency through a courier company.

Activity 5: The Federal agency approves the work permit.

Activity 6: The attorney firm receives the approval notice of the work permit and the same is scanned and electronically to the client.

From the above example, you can see the different activities associated in obtaining the work permit and the goal to obtain a work permit by collaborating with the client, internal employees, courier agency and the Federal Agency.

Complexity present in the above manual process:

• Client’s and Candidate’s data are not stored in a centralised repository. So, no automated mechanism to use this data on need basis.
• Client and Candidate documents are stored in email and as well as in attorney’s lap top. Hence data redundancy.
• When the same candidate applies for extension, the same data and documents cannot be used quickly since it is scattered in multiple emails and laptops.
• Time taken to prepare Government forms is more since client’s data and candidate’s data will not be replicated in Government forms and documents.
• Work permit start date and end date cannot be tracked and hence cannot notify the candidate or the client about work permit end date.
• Difficult to manage the Government Federal compliance process.
• Individual, client and internal reports cannot be generated.
• Whenever there is a new requirement from the client for another employee, the same process must be repeated.

To overcome these problems, the attorney firm calls software implementation companies, interacts with them, send RFI (Request for Inquiries) and get RFP (Request for proposal from them) and finally a software company “Optix” bags the order from the attorney firm and implements application.

Explain Business Process with an example.