Business process from "Start" to "End" — all you need to know from Avivi experts

For years, Avivi has been developing and implementing business processes in companies all over the world, so our specialists can talk about it for hours. However, not all customers and ordinary entrepreneurs correctly understand the very essence of business processes and their meaning. We decided to correct this discrepancy, so in this article we will talk about business processes in general and give real examples. So even if you don't order development, after reading this article you will have comprehensive information and understanding of what, what for and why. And we will start, as always, with the main thing.

Everything is not just like that

Business processes occur in every business, regardless of whether you are aware of their existence or whether they are documented at the company level. Without it, business is impossible a priori, and the complexity of the business process depends only on the scale of your case and the list of involved resources. Unlike HR processes, which require the presence of more than 1 employee, business processes are present in your commercial activities even when you are self-employed. For example, a freelance developer working remotely from the Indian Ocean coast in Bali performs the same steps: search for tasks, agree to the terms of reference, work, report to the customer, and get paid for their efforts — a prime example of a repeatable business process for one person. If a team works, i.e. 2 or more participants, then business processes are able to describe all production relations between these people. And the overall success of the whole affair will depend on how clearly everyone will understand their tasks and fulfill their assigned duties.

Therefore, we summarize: a business process is a set of actions repeated over time and aimed at creating value for internal and external customers of the company. In the case of employees, it is the profit received from work, and for the company's customers, it is the opportunity to receive the desired goods or services. Business processes are unique for each individual company: even if they are the same in purpose, they will be performed by completely different people, which means that different options are possible.

For example: the business process of placing an order. In one case, the company manager receives the application from the client from the online store, clarifies the details by phone and creates a list for the warehouse employees. Otherwise, the manager processes the order from a message on WhatsApp, independently collects the package and sends it via FedEx. The essence of all the listed actions is the same, and the methods of its achievement are completely different.

Let's go without unknowns

An old proverb says: "The right hand does not know what the left hand is doing", when it comes to the shortcomings of business processes. (English: Biblical truth says: "...let the left hand not know what the right hand does..." — and this cannot be the case in business processes.) Each of the processes can be considered as a resource of the company, and from other economic disciplines we we know that the rational use of the resource reduces the cost of the final product and increases the profit. Similarly, with business processes: the better conditions are created for its course, the more benefits we will receive at the end. In theory, efficiency is measured by the ratio of "inputs" and "outputs" of business processes:

Input (start) is all the necessary resources of the enterprise (material, labor, information) necessary to start the desired process;

Output (end) is the end result of a business process, for which resources have been used and which has value for internal (employees) and external (customers) consumers of the company. Outputs can serve as inputs for new business processes.

Quite often, business owners who clearly imagine the model of the entire company are rather superficially oriented in the real course of affairs, which inevitably harms the entire company. One simple step, for example, obtaining a building permit, actually consists of a huge amount of bureaucratic procedures, time spent on their implementation, assessments, payments and other mandatory components. A good example is the visual scheme:

At first glance, it looks comical, but in fact controversial points in business processes pose a great threat to your business. Do you know that according to the average indicators of world statistics:

●     15% of agreements lose their relevance precisely because of the too long time of their approval?

●     20% of production downtime is due to gaps in logistics?

●     30% of marketing-generated leads don't convert to deals because sales can't handle traffic flow?

To prevent these and similar situations that inevitably occur in business, there is a separate discipline — BPM (Business process management), the task of which is the planning and management of business processes, the identification of all unknown or controversial points and their elimination or optimization. BPM answers five basic questions about work: “What exactly?”, "where?", "when?", "why?" and "how?" is performed. However, in order to answer all these questions, certain stages of business development must be passed.

When should business processes be implemented?

The best advice for business processes is to develop them before starting a business. But this is a utopian theory, since even the most careful and perfect planning always encounters challenges from reality and needs to be adjusted. In any case, preliminary planning on paper or with the help of modern information systems is able to clarify the picture of the future business and simulate any process quite accurately even before real people or automated assistants begin to perform it. In practice, however, most businesses develop contrary to theory: people start doing something and over time systematize their knowledge and skills into a certain knowledge base. In this case, scientists distinguish five levels in the development of business processes:

1. Initial level: people work as they see fit, their activities are not regulated by anything. In this case, each employee has his own unique business knowledge, which is irretrievably lost, for example, when the employee is fired;

2. Level of awareness: it becomes clear to everyone that it is not possible to continue working like this. Therefore, internal standards and instructions created on the basis of previous achievements in work appear in the company. These are already archetypes of business processes;

3. Level of manageability: the company already has documented business processes — the management system is separated from the personnel, that is, if an employee is replaced in the team, the result of the overall work will remain unchanged;

4. Level of measurability: Business processes are now not only executed, but also analyzed and improved. The performance evaluation system leads to their optimization and stimulation of personnel to work even better. For this, new business processes are created that work in parallel with the existing ones and are considered auxiliary;

5. Level of improvement: all business processes of the company are under close supervision and control. The documentation is constantly being improved and there is simply no upper limit to this level.

Interaction of business processes

As you can see, with the development of any business and the involvement of more employees in it, there is a need to implement new business processes, in addition to the primary ones. Thus, there is a need to create their hierarchy and interaction, which is also done by BPM. Fortunately, the gradation of business processes is already known and described in many sources, so it will not be difficult to understand it. Conditional division is as follows:

Core processes are cross-functional and end-to-end business processes that result in value for the end user. Usually there are several such processes and the output of each creates more value than the input and, in turn, is a component of the input for the next one. The execution of the main processes ensures that the company achieves its mission. Simply put, core business processes are the essence of business.

Support —  service business processes designed to support the main ones. These processes do not create value for consumers, but are needed only to serve the main ones. Auxiliary processes include logistics, accounting operations, HR processes, legal support and much more.

Management processes — also do not create any value, but are needed to monitor, analyze and control the rest of the business processes in the company. It is with the help of management processes that it is possible to improve basic and auxiliary, financial and budget planning, quality management and development of new business processes.

Usually, the main focus of attention of business owners falls only on the main processes, and this is natural, because the success of the company depends on them. However, from Avivi's practice, we can say that absolutely all business processes need attention, because they can hide the main reason for the failure of even the most promising business. After all, for example, tailoring of high-quality shoes is not possible from the timely delivery of soles that are not produced by a sewing company, or even some accessories, such as eyelets for lacing. Similarly, timely receipt of detailed reports from the sales department ensures better planning, and the absence of reports will lead to idle production or vice versa — costs for goods that will lie in the warehouse without demand. These examples are not related to the core business processes, but the problems presented in them are well known to all business owners.

Description of business processes

Hopefully, we have already convinced you that knowledge of business processes is important for any business. But how to develop your own processes or document existing ones? For this, there are several proven methods that you can use yourself. In any case, the description is necessary for IT development, which we will talk about later.

The simplest method is textual, when everything that happens in the company is described in ordinary words. It does not require special skills or technical means, so the text method is accessible to everyone. A detailed description is fine for small business processes, but the larger your business, the more difficult it will be to describe and read such text. The biggest drawback of the method is its inability to analyze and low ability to make changes. Will employees want to read many pages of boring text? Will they correctly understand the essence and correctly follow the instructions? We will leave this question for reflection.

The next method is tabular, when the entire structure of the business process is displayed in tables. The first significant advantage over the text is the graphic appearance, which simplifies the understanding of the essence of the process. Any table systematizes the information entered into it, which allows for analysis and improves human perception. However, not everyone is able to create clear and convenient tables. It is also difficult to combine individual tables, and it is even more difficult to depict the branching of a business process using a tabular method.

The graphic method is considered the best for describing business processes, when information is depicted in the form of connected block diagrams. Everything is visible here: input, actions, stages, transition conditions, connections and output. Diagrams.net, Visio, and even the vector editor Figma are used to create diagrams. The graphical method is certainly understandable to the average employee, but this does not mean that creating a process in it is as easy as reading the result. For high-quality graphic development of a business process, you should know the rules of its construction, be guided by logic, be able to apply the rules of decomposition and understand BPM. Therefore, we advise our clients to engage experts for planning business processes, because the created sketches serve as a technical task for IT developers.

Development of automated business processes

For IT experts, any business process is nothing more than an algorithm — a set of instructions that describe the order of actions of the performer to achieve a certain result. Our developers have been dealing with algorithms throughout the entire existence of Avivi, as programming is based on this principle. That is why the transformation of the company's business processes into machine codes is a common task and the only question is on which platform this algorithm should be implemented.

Since 2012, Avivi has been engaged in development for Bitrix24 and is a Gold Partner, which confirms the compliance of the knowledge and skills of our developers with the high standards of the vendor. The Bitrix24 business toolset is designed to bring the entire company's work online and has numerous tools for solving a large list of tasks. Among them is the functionality of business processes, which allows you to display absolutely all processes taking place in your company in the system. That is why the block diagram created for you turns from an ordinary drawing into a full-fledged working scenario, according to which all company employees work.

But if you do not use Bitrix24, this does not mean that business processes are not available to you! Basically, the entire functionality of automated business processes is a backend that interacts with users through a certain interface. On the account of Avivi developers, there are many cases that ensure the operation of the main, auxiliary or all business processes in custom solutions, for example:

●      a personal account for clients of a consulting company, created on Pythone;

●      functionality for MLM business participants based on the CMS of the main site;

●      numerous bots in Telegram and other messengers that help users move according to a defined scenario and many others. 

We hope that our article helped you understand the essence and importance of business processes in the company. Their documentation is necessary for achieving the goals of any business, its development and increasing profitability. However, simply described business processes are only half the story. Therefore, Avivi experts will be happy to help you create automated business processes, help you choose the necessary platform, and, if necessary, provide advice on the detailed description and design of the technical task for our developers.