Business process

A business process is a recipe for achieving a commercial result. Each business process has inputs, method and outputs. The inputs are a pre-requisite that must be in place before the method can be put into practice. When the method is applied to the inputs, then certain outputs will be created.

A business process is a collection of related structural activities that produce something of value to the organization, its stake holders or its customers. It is, for example, the process through which an organization realizes its services to its customers.

A business process can be part of a larger, encompassing process and can include other business processes that have to be included in its method. In that context a business process can be viewed at various levels of granularity. The linkage of business process with value generation leads some practitioners to view business processes as the workflows which realize an organization's use cases.

A business process can be thought of as a cookbook for running a business; "Answer the phone", "place an order", "produce an invoice" might all be examples of a Business Process.

A business process is usually the result of a business process design or business process reengineering activity.