With Business Processes, we can start to think about HOW to realise Business Capabilities on a day-to-day basis. To get a grasp on how a company is doing its "business", a business process modelling (BPM) exercise can be done.
BPM is all about modelling your processes/workflows as a logical sequence of activities/tasks performed by your business users on a daily basis and thus realising the company's defined capabilities. Modelling and making your existing business processes visible (by means of a Business Process Model) is an excellent way to further analyse and improve your processes: once you have modelled how things are happening today, you can start analysing your current processes and possibly improve them by cutting out/transforming activities/tasks that don't add value.
At TVH Parts, we use the international standard BPMN (2.0) as a Business Process modelling technique. BPMN is a graphical representation for specifying business processes in a business process model and is an intuitive and easy way for non-expert users to understand how things are actually done.
The business process models are created and stored in a centralised analysis repository using Sparx Enterprise Architect (Ver14). These are made available to the different stakeholders (business, analysts, system support, developers ...) via a client/server system and in the near future via a simple web interface (ProCloudServer/WebEA).