Business Process – Before jumping right in and giving you the answer lets

first break apart the two parts of the question.

What is a business?
A business is an organised group of people who coordinate their work to
create, deliver and capture value.
Even if you are a sole business owner operator it takes the combined efforts
of many people such as employees in supporting businesses.
I want to take this a step further to say that a true business is one that you can
take a 3 month holiday and come back to a business that has appreciated in
equity.
Otherwise if you return to a business that has somehow lost customers or
worse still, no business at all then you have something that is a lot worse than
a JOB because at least with a job you can accrue holiday or long service
leave time and take a vacation while getting paid regularly.

What is a process?
In a business we break up the job of creating value into chunks of tasks or
activities that individuals can do according to their skill set.
We do these activities in a given sequence like an assembly line.
Each person is a specialist, does their bit of work and then passes it on to the
next person.
Like an assembly line each process has a start, an end and a series of
activities in between.

Adding Value
Each activity creates something or changes something – this is called adding
value.

Input and Output

So something goes into the value adding activity and something different
comes out.
The thing goes in is called input. The thing that comes out is called output.

The Role
Usually we assign someone with the right skillset and training the
responsibility of doing the value adding work.
This is called their Role. Everyone in business plays a role.

The Decision
Sometimes we need to make a decision somewhere in the sequence of
activities.
Depending on the decision we might take a different path in the sequence of
activities.
These decision points are called gateways.
Put everything together and we have a business process.

A business process is NOT…

 IT systems (hardware and software)
 common sense
 working from inside your head
 checklist or to-do list

A business process IS…

So a business process is a sequence of activities designed to create, deliver
and capture value.
A business process shows us how well we perform those activities.
A business process shows us how long we perform those activities.
A business process shows us how accurately we perform those activities.
This has a huge impact on the overall output of a business and its success.
We are striving for a faster, better and optimised business.