Practical Introduction to Business Process Engineering

Abstract

The design of business processes is not a new discipline but is essentially as old as the creation of products and labor services. Over time, the originally purely experiential approach has been augmented by an engineering component so that one speaks today of business process engineering. This circumscribes the design and layout, the analysis, improvement, optimization as well as the documentation of operational activities and their basic conditions. This is done, in practice, far too often only with the help of informal tools—with natural language text, including tables and graphics, for example. The simple comprehensibility often is paid for with inconsistencies and omissions in the resulting process descriptions. The consequences are dangerous as well as costly quality problems in the practical implementation of such processes. The remedy is a formal graphical modeling technique. This will provide significant quality improvements in business process engineering and the subsequent process of implementation.