A business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular customer or customers. It often can be visualized with a flowchart as a sequence of business process activities.
There are three types of business process:
- Management processes, the business process that govern the operation of a system. Typical management processes include “Corporate Governance” and “Strategic Management”.
- Operational processes, business process that constitute the core business and create the primary value stream. Typical operational processes are Purchasing, Manufacturing, Advertising and Marketing, and Sales.
- Supporting processes, which support the core business process. Examples include Accounting, Recruitment, Call center, Technical support.
The overall effectiveness of a business process is the extent to which the outputs expected from the process are being obtained at all, and is therefore a first measure of the basic adequacy of the business process and its capability to fulfill the logical and reasonable expectations of process uses and operators. A business process can be complex or reasonably straightforward.
Internal controls can be built into manual / administrative business process steps and or computer system procedures.
It is advisable to build in as many business process controls as possible, since these controls, being automatic, will always be exercised since they are built into the design of the business process system software. For instance, an error message preventing an entry of a received raw material quantity exceeding the purchase order quantity by greater than the permissible tolerance percentage will always be displayed and will prevent the system user from entering such a quantity, as defined by the business process.