Working with business processes

Every organization uses business processes to accomplish work. A business process is a set of business activities that represent the required steps to achieve a business objective.

For example, you might have a business process that handles credit card disputes. The business outcome is to resolve the dispute in an efficient and accurate way in order to minimize cost to your organization and to retain customer satisfaction. The process itself includes all of the steps needed to meet the objective. For example, activities such as receiving the claim, examining the validity of the claim, deciding whether to remove the charge, and informing the customer of the decision.

The business process management approach is iterative; you don't implement it once, never to be touched again. Instead, you design, model, create, simulate, monitor, and optimize your processes on a regular basis. The feedback you receive from testing and monitoring your processes drives continuous improvements to your organization's workflows.