Business process: analysis of business processes. Description, application, results

Any entrepreneur needs to at least indirectly know what a business process is. Analysis of business processes helps to reduce costs, improve profitability and ultimately increase the profit of the enterprise. In the economic literature, this concept is first encountered in the works of researchers of the 80s of the last century. It was then that the United States first thought about the fact that the effectiveness of the entire production depends on a set of interrelated actions, called a business process.

Definitions

The business process is a complex concept. Business development is highly dependent on interrelated operations, procedures and actions. You can not imagine a plant without the supply of raw materials, its processing, workers for machine tools and accountants. An enterprise is a closed system that functions as an integral organism. And to ensure that everything works correctly without any hiccups and delays, the main brain is needed - an experienced manager who will conduct the analysis and will monitor the coherence of the actions of all business processes.

If you look from an economic point of view, the interconnectedness of all possible measures, during which the processing of external resources into the final product for the consumer, is called a business process. The analysis of business processes is the evaluation of the effectiveness of a particular action, operation or event related to production.

What are they needed for

It's quite easy to describe business processes. But the biggest problem of reality is that in any enterprise in our country it is seldom possible to find a person who is really interested in improving the efficiency of various production processes. Small and medium-sized businesses are trying to use long-obsolete methods of reducing costs, while in the West they realized for a long time that the success of a business depends on a competent hired manager who is interested in obtaining the maximum results from his work.

The creation of business processes provides a clear understanding of who is responsible for which stage, what position it occupies, and what it should do. This structuring makes the production scheme transparent and makes it easier to manage it. By bringing the tree of goals to the staff, you can increase their motivation by demonstrating that their work is aimed at common goals. In addition, the organization of business in this way will help to identify the extra costs of financial and time resources.

How to create

Regardless of whether a big business or small, the approach to creating a detailed plan is one. Let's consider a concrete example. There is a firm selling couches. The scheme of business processes is similar to a tree. On the main branches are placed the main functions, which branch out into smaller ones. So, what are the main stages of the business process for a retailer?

1. Purchase of goods. This is the first and central business process. What kind of sub-stages does he have?

• Analysis of suppliers.
• Drawing up contracts with manufacturing plants.
• Drawing up contracts with transport companies.

2. Seating of sofas. At this stage, there are such moments:

• Selecting a room.
• Building or renting a room.
• Creation of conditions for sales.

3. The sales process.

• Staff recruitment.
• Purchase of cash register.
• Creating an atmosphere and design for sales.

4. Marketing and advertising.

• Placement of a signboard.
• Creation of business cards, booklets, brochures, catalogs, etc.
• Advertisement placement.

The list can be long. It is important to understand how the creation of business processes. And further we will result some gold rules that the business organization was successful.

Rule number 1

For each dedicated business phase, a specific person answers. Involve them in creating schemes. This will provide an opportunity to understand the process in more detail, to interest employees and increase their motivation, aimed at achieving common goals. This is especially important in the early stages of the establishment of the enterprise. Starting a business is always connected with huge difficulties, and the timely setting of goals for specific stages will give a more detailed plan for action.

Rule number 2

Use automated programs and visualize your schemes. To date, there are many ready-made programs that help to structure information. Small and medium businesses use them everywhere.

If you work in a group, take a board or pieces of paper to write everything down and in the course of your thoughts draw a tree of your processes. Start with larger operations, painting them on smaller ones. For large enterprises, the creation of business processes is a huge and painstaking work, requiring maximum concentration and coherence of actions of all employees.

Rule number 3

Formulating business processes, focus on the strategy of the firm, and not on its organizational structure. The same function can go beyond the established departments. For example, when delivering goods from a supplier, you can consider the boundary of the business process until the goods are out of the business itself, that is, when it is placed on the shelves and is available to the consumer. In this process, several departments that are members of the organizational structure participate at once.

Rule number 4

Do not over-detail the plan. If the scheme is overloaded with excessive information, this will lead to a general confusion and a heavy burden on the responsible staff. If you plan to make changes in a particular segment, this part needs to be detailed, and all the others should be considered only superficially, without going into details. The effectiveness of business processes is subject to Pareto's law "20 to 80", when 20% of detailed descriptions will bring 80% of the success of the entire operation.

Rule number 5

Do not be afraid of the truth and build a scheme based on what is in fact. Very often this situation arises. The chief manager questions his subordinates about their departments with the purpose of building a business process diagram. They try and tell how they are doing well. Although in reality the real situation is far from ideal. But on the basis of false data an incorrect scheme will be built, after which inefficient decisions will be made and all work will go to waste.

Do not confuse the concept of "as is", "how it should be" and "how I want it to be." However bad it may be, business processes are designed precisely to improve this condition. Therefore, it is necessary to describe only the real situation.

Automation of business processes

It is very difficult to monitor all the events taking place within the company, especially if it concerns large corporations and syndicates. Big business is difficult to imagine without a whole system of automated programs that allow you to analyze incoming data for decision making. Therefore, today it is very often a question of automating business processes.

In practice, this means that there is a special computer program that processes all kinds of information flows that support the business process. The analysis of business processes takes place in an autonomous mode, and the person only gets acquainted with the received results and makes a corresponding conclusion.

Selecting the method of analysis

Faced with the question of how it is better to describe business processes automatically, the domestic entrepreneur will find many options that are not optimized for the Russian market. Almost all the proposed software was created for Western companies that have experience in optimizing production. But after analyzing some of the data, we created our list of programs, through which the business process is implemented.

1. BEST-5 "My Business" is software that often uses small and medium-sized businesses. The program is available for any computer and is very easy to use. Its advantage is that it can analyze small amounts of data from a small enterprise.
2. Corporate Modeler. It is often used in modern enterprises, mainly because it is inexpensive. It is easy to start a business with this program, because it is very convenient to build business process diagrams, but the analysis is almost not carried out.
3. IGrafx Enterprise Central. Very good Canadian development. Is able not only to recognize and compose business plans, but also to successfully analyze the arrays of input data. In our country has very little distribution, although the product is very decent.
4. Business Studio. The most famous Russian development. It is integrated with other MS Office products (Word, Excel, Visio). For a domestic entrepreneur, this is the optimal choice for the price-result ratio. Excellent analysis of the business process. Production can be successfully optimized thanks to the results obtained on the basis of the program.

Technology of building business processes

Most often today, there is an integration of the automatic and manual method of constructing the "Business Process" scheme. Analysis of business processes in this case is carried out in two stages: the first with the results obtained on the computer, the second - manually by the manager.

Let's consider two basic approaches to the construction of graphs and schemes. In this case, the technology of business processes will be built using such methods:

1. DFD (Data flow diagramming).
2. WFD (Work Flow Diagram).

The first DFD method involves drawing a diagram of data flows. They include: detailed work of the process, responsible staff, the necessary documentation. Such a construction gives a complete picture of the firm's activities, its surrounding input and output data, all the elements of the production process and the relationships between them. This approach allows you to identify free (unnecessary) business processes that reduce the effectiveness of the result and can be optimized in various ways.

WFD - workflow diagrams that describe the lower-level business processes. Business development can significantly change if you know not only the vertical hierarchy of actions, but also the horizontal hierarchy. What does it mean?

If you look at it, WFD diagrams are a grid of time frames, each graph of which is responsible for a particular process. Suppose the delivery of the goods lasts two days - the schedule marks the beginning and end of the process. Then comes the event of placing the goods in the trading floor, and this process will begin only after the delivery is completed. The data are plotted sequentially on the graph. Events, operations, and actions can be intertwined if executed simultaneously. It is convenient to start business development at an early stage in this way, determining how long it takes for a full production cycle.

conclusions

For a small or large, new or old enterprise, you need an understanding of what a business process is. At any stage of the firm's life cycle, the optimization of production can significantly affect the further development. After all, the main goal of the existence of any organization today is the satisfaction of the needs of the consumer. And if the customer is satisfied, he will make a profit. The relationship here is directly proportional. The higher the level of customer satisfaction, the higher the profit of the company. And this can be achieved only by analyzing and then changing the process within the enterprise.