What is business process modeling – definition and benefits

To know what is process modeling, we need to understand what is a process and its role inside a company.

A defined order of tasks or activities spread through time and space, with a beginning, an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs. It is a business process. A company has many processes, in all areas, be it marketing, financial, service or production. These processes must be correctly modeled, mapped, optimized, and automatized, to generate value to the customer.

Process modeling is a technique designed to understand and describe the process. It connects and improves the communication between the current and the future state of a process. For example, a diagram that represents how to deliver a product – from the client’s order, the entry, communication with shipping, inventory or making to the delivering is a mapping of a process.

What is business process modeling? What is the difference from process mapping?

With modeling, the goal is to optimize the process. Although both process modeling and process mapping are techniques that break the process in pieces and allows us to study it, they are not the same. Process mapping is more oriented towards clarifying roles and procedures. On the other hand, process modeling incorporates the work flow and business rules.

Business Process modeling is connected with the trials done to visualize the possibilities that a process holds. Process modeling enables a deeper understanding of the tests and outcomes, setting a strong start to the optimization process, and making it possible and easier to visualize where the bottlenecks are and what are the inefficiencies.

To know more, see process mapping and process mapping techniques.

Business Process Modeling information

There are some categories of information that is gathered in the process of modeling. Here we will approach each one of them:

  • Inputs: inputs are anything that is transformed or consumed. It includes physical transformation, local moving or information change. The goal here is that the transformation adds value to the input, and therefore to the client.
  • Outputs: the result of the transformation that happens with the inputs.
  • Enablers: facilitators are used to transforming the inputs into outputs. For example equipment, human resource, etc.
  • Guides: guides are anything that helps define when, how and why a process occurs. Information, rules, knowledge, receipts, performance reports, all these are guides.

 

What are the process modeling techniques?

Visualizing is one of the most important factors in understanding. It is ideal to create a diagram or flow to see the process and therefore know what to change, to improve, to optimize. To do that, we can use some techniques.

  • Individual interviews: gathering information from one-to-one interviews.
  • Facilitated sessions: collect data through meetings with groups of people. The people can be from the same department or different ones, depending on the goal.
  • Top-down: this approach breaks the process from the unity to the pieces.
  • Bottom-up: this method starts to analyze the process from the workflow level to the whole. It is slower than the top-down but encounters more details.

To start the project, it is fundamental to ask yourself what is process modeling to your company. From that, you can determine where you are right now, where you have come from, how you have got to where you are, where you need to go, and how you will get there.

It is crucial to count on a reliable software when applying process modeling into your company. Only like that you will see significant cost reduction, improves in communication, increase productivity and much more. Now that you know what business process model is, you may be interested in reading more about what is the BPM approach, and how can it make your company cut costs significantly.

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