Business Process Vs. Workflow: What you should know
Business Process and Workflow are two terms that have been extensively spoken about. And guess what, these terms are many times wrongfully used interchangeably. But what really is a business process and how does it differ from workflow? Read this post for everything you need to know about business processes and workflow and how these terms differ from each other.
Business Process: What does it mean?
Like we mentioned earlier, there are a lot of misconceptions about business processes and today’s post will attempt to give you the correct definition of business processes. For starters, a business process refers to a series of steps or actions executed by a group of people or a team within an organization to achieve a specific organizational goal.
Every step detailed in the business process usually requires actions from everyone involved. And just so you know, the sequence of the steps plays a significant role in determining the order of the actions. Not just that, participants may come from the same or different departments or functional groups within the organization. What this means is that a business process can cross organizational boundaries in a bid to achieve specific goals or actions.
While a business process has proven to be a reliable model for organizations to achieve their goals and objectives, the successful completion of a process doesn’t necessarily mean that the organization has achieved its set goal and that’s because problems beyond team members’ control may surface during the process.
Let us also quickly add that organizations evaluate business processes from time to time and may decide to cancel, terminate, or make changes to the process. Also, in some cases, the routing and sequence of actions can be tweaked to achieve different results. And depending on the business process executed, these circumstances can be tweaked based on internal and external factors.
In any organization where a business process is executed, individuals or team members are expected to participate in the right order, at the right time, while taking advantage of all resources provided. Doing this will ensure that the organization archives its set goals. What this entails is that for a business process to be successful, the organization has to clearly map out how they intend to do things and how everyone involved needs to interact and function. With a clearly defined business process, individuals and teams know exactly what actions to take and when.
Thankfully, mapping out a clearly defined business process isn’t as difficult as you imagine, and that’s because of the many great tools and approaches available to organizations. To make your work pretty easy, you’ll not be disappointed to give the BPMN 2.0 standard a try. This standard is designed to make modeling business processes a walk in the park. And just so you know, BPMN is an acronym for Business Process Model and Notation. This standard provides robust guidelines and best practices for mapping out a strategic business process.
What is a Workflow?
If you have been following all our explanations so far, you should know that not all business processes can be automated because of their unique nature. And for the avoidance of any confusion, when we say automated, what we simply mean is digitized.
To bring you up to speed, a Workflow refers to a part or the entirety of a business process that is either partially or fully automated.
Even though a business process can’t be fully digitized, there are instances where a part of the business process can be digitized. By digitizing a business process, organizations have so much to benefit from, especially in improving their efficiency. Through digitization, organizations can seamlessly implement straight-through processing and extract decisions within the process while also managing them separately to improve efficiency and guarantee a high consistency level.
While Workflow is a welcome development within an organization, you must always remember that automating the business process, i.e., modeling and executing Workflow doesn’t end by simply digitizing the process. To improve the results you’re looking for, you can simply leverage powerful technologies like Process Robotics Automation or RPA to digitize and automate the actual tasks and activities team members are expected to execute. Doing this will significantly reduce the error rate while also improving staff productivity and availability.
Organizations can leverage powerful tools like decision robotics and integrate them into the workflow to improve productivity and efficiency. By doing this, organizations can seamlessly automate individual tasks and configure the tool to make decisions on behalf of humans as per the data and rules provided. This will significantly remove human biases and noises across all decision-making processes within an organization.
In a nutshell
Having read to this point, we are sure you now know that business processes and workflows aren’t interchangeable. Similarly, while any business process can be modeled ( i.e., mapped out), not all business processes can be digitized.
And like we mentioned earlier, when a part of a business process is digitized either partially or fully automated, we refer to them as a workflow. A workflow is designed to automatically interact with different participants involved as everyone involved is expected to take specific actions as it relates to a task. And yes, a workflow can be significantly improved to beef up performance and efficiency through the use of advanced automation tools like decision robotics and decision automation platform.
Learn more here: https://www.flexrule.com/archives/business-process-vs-workflow/
