Business process definition: A bottom-up approach

Abstract

In recent years there has been considerable focus on business processes which has created a debate on their definition. One school of thought believes that a standard set of business processes can be applied fairly universally to most businesses; others believe that business processes are individual and specific to organizations. Reviews this debate and presents a view based on a technique developed to define business processes using a bottom-up approach. This technique focuses first on the business activities and goes on to quantify the relationships between business activities. The hypothesis behind the work described is that the closely coupled activities could be grouped together to form a natural business process. Describes the technique developed for bottom-up identification of business processes in some detail and presents a case study which has been designed as a controlled experiment.