Nowadays, the best mapping and process analysis practices address the quality of the services offered to the customer or the compliance with the rules and/or best practices worldwide.

Therefore, concepts such as task, position, function, department, division, chief, team, and more, are now replaced by terms such as processes vision, process description, process owner, process output, process input, process efficacy/efficiency and more.

The new central position of processes, known as process vision or process approach, led to a reorganization of the company in the services sector.

The goal is to

• expedite organization, introducing new inter-functional workteams focusing on common targets and able to deal directly and successfully with the performances;
• modify the skills required, overcoming the fragmentation of tasks and skills;
• obtain a management approach for continuous improvement, based both on result monitoring and on  the participation of all the team members.

The Business Process Analysis (BPA) is an identification, mapping and analysis of process performances that a Company (both private and public) implements to supply its services. Therefore the BPA  shows its central role in the identification of organizational behaviors, meaning   the correct activities to fulfill the users’ requirements and to find and describe all the processes needed to perform the service.

A&P Consulting suggests using a consolidated best practice to be implemented through Corporate Modeler and the following steps:

• process identification/representation  in its components (Deming workbench);
• processes classification;
• mapping of identified processes in the EA model;
• use of analysis instruments (matrix and simulation engine).

A process is usually defined as a collection of related, structured activities with the aim of transforming inputs into outputs. Namely, these activities work together to obtain a definite and measurable result is valuable for the user.

In a process, it is always possible to identify the typical elements that characterize it, as shown in the picture:

• Supplier: the first element of the input process; these inputs could be meant as useful information to devise and fuel the process of the required service;
• Client: at the end of the process chain;
• Input: provided by the supplier or simply part of the process itself;
• Output: service or product with added value for the client;
• Efficiency: organizational system status that evaluates the process productivity;
• Efficacy: organizational system status that evaluates the process quality.

The application of the Deming Process Workbench model can single out the process elements.

The Deming Process Workbench is a method of process identification. It is a tool which illustrates the boundaries that define the scope of any given process. It defines the process components necessary for the producer to accomplish quality control, measurement and improvement (optimization). It also helps identify activities that comprise a process so that an analysis may be performed.

One of the most important aims of BPA, once all the processes performing the business have been identified, is to recognize which processes are fundamental for the business and which are only supporting, according to a classification strictly depending on the company organizational culture.

One step further in the organizational system breakdown is defining views that represent the knowledge contained in the analysis model.

Such views are pooled into  the following levels:

• Level 0: the declaration of the objects of a company’s organizational system. It includes the processes, according to the predefined classification, the organizational structure and the supplied services structure;
• Level 1: breakdown of high level processes into lower order processes. The naming convention of such processes will depend on the organizational structure of the Company itself. A possible and commonly accepted naming is as follows:

1. a. Strategic areas
2. b. Macro processes
3. c. Main processes
4. d. Processes
5. e. Sub processes
6. f. Activities

The required breakdown is in fact a WBS (Work Breakdown Structure) which lists the processes to be performed for each service to be supplied.

• Level 2: the sequencing of end-to-end processes with the identification of the inputs and relevant outputs.
• Level 3: the identification of the actors and flowcharting of the activities done in the specific process. Such flowcharts are represented in ISO and BPMN language according to modeling complexity.
• Level 4: it shows the relations between the actors and their activities, in terms of rules and extent of involvement (matrix RACI: responsible, accountable, consulted, informed), or, alternatively, between the activities and artifacts made/manipulated by the process itself (matrix CRUD: create, read, update, delete; matrix UIOP: use, input, output, print). This level is useful to show even those relations with objects differing from processes and actors; for example, the relations between the applications  and the activities they support, or between the process actors and the applications they use to perform their own activities, and more.

These last two views can be made if detailed elements are available to show the relations between actors and activities, and the real or expected performances of the system components to be simulated.

The main analysis instruments that can be adopted for the processes are the matrix and the simulation engine.

The former identifies the organizational units’ involvement  into the processes: the higher the number of processes in a model, the more these are useful.

The latter, the simulation engine has a very special role in foreseeing (and modifying) any “bottle neck” or resource-saturation conditions. It is possible to apply data from the simulation and improve the final solution.

Moreover, a number of  process libraries is available, such as norms or best-practices (eTOM, ITIL, ISO, SOX, Basilea II, Solvency, and more) that can be used when designing company processes or when adapting to specific situations and compliance control.

Using modeling tools, which can model the system and flowchart the views, is fundamental for the use (and reuse) of such data.

The Casewise Corporate Modeler Suite and the available Casewise libraries could be the best answer to modeling and flowcharting demands on a Company system organizational behavior.