Process Analysis
Process Analysis is the act of conducting a thorough review and arriving at a complete understanding of a business process (or portion thereof), with the goal of maintaining or achieving process excellence, or achieving incremental to transformational improvements in a business process.
Process analysis involves looking at all components of a process – inputs, outputs, mechanisms and controls – inspecting each component individually and as they interact to produce results. These components can often be categorized into the people, processes, applications, data, and technology needed to support a business goal or objective. Analyses cover and uncover quality, time, and costs at all points of a business process, from inception to completion.
Aids to process analysis include:
- Visual process models, both static and dynamic
- Data collected at the beginning, duration, and end of key activities, lower level processes, and the entire business process itself
- Business process analysis methods such as value chain analysis, end‐to‐end modeling, and functional decomposition.
Some typical process analyses are:
- Resource utilization
- Distribution analysis
- Cycle time analysis
- Cost analysis
- Software application usage
- Global/Local process variations.
Holistic business process analyses evaluate:
- Total cost of the process tools (e.g., computer systems)
- Impact of the process on internal participants (employees) and external (paying) customers and stakeholders
- Impact of the process on the organization’s community (e.g., environmental impacts) and other stakeholders.
Source: Guide to the Business Process Management Body of Knowledge – ABPMP BPM CBOK on Amazon
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