Business processes are a set of activities involved within or outside an organization that work together to produce a business outcome for a customer or to an organization.
An organization may have specific goals, aims and targets to be achieved. For products to be manufactured or sold or serviced, there are several activities involved with this organization like employees recruitment, machinery installation, purchasing goods, manufacturing of products, selling and servicing the product to consumers/vendors, collecting the payments and implementing governments rules etc., and these activities collectively are called as business processes.
Different kinds of Business Processes:
- Business Processes that are within an organization. (e.g. product manufacturing)
- Business Processes that are between organizations e.g Mortgage sales by a mortgage company and escrow (payment of insurance and taxes) servicing for that mortgage done by some other company. These are called business to business transactions and are done through application interfaces.
- Business Processes that are managerial.(HR and Recruitment process)
- Business Processes that are operational.(service calls attended in call centers, information stored by bank tellers regarding opening an account etc.)
- Business Processes that are activity oriented: The transformations that takes place in a data warehouse.