Maybe you've heard of business process modeling. You sketch out some boxes and then you get some
arrows between them. That looks great. And that describes a particular area of your business and
how it works, and then a group of fancy business analysts look at that shift some boxes around,
and then, voila, your business has been optimized. Well, kinda, but process models, first of all,
are not made manually by someone with a marker pen. They are produced by data mining algorithms
that analyze how a business process actually works by looking at the data. And it turns out that if
you really understand how a business works, you can optimize it in some pretty amazing ways.
So we're going to define what business process modeling is, how business process models are made,
what they show, and some benefits of this whole exercise. Now, most enterprises have a pretty good
idea of the various business processes powering the daily operations. However, when they need
to ensure that those processes consistently drive optimal outcomes, a pretty good idea isn't really
going to cut it. Now, business process modeling usually involves creating a diagram or a flow
chart of the steps in the process like that, with each step represented by a symbol and process,
models are typically rendered using one of two standardized styles of graphical business process
notation. There's BPMN that stands for Business Process Modeling Notation. And then there is UML
and that stands for Unified Modeling Language. Within these notation systems, certain visual
elements have universally recognized meanings when used in the process model. So, for example, ovals.
Ovals represent the beginnings and the end points of processes. Then we have rectangles.
Rectangles represent specific activities within a workflow. We have.
Diamonds and diamonds represent decision points or gateways. We have arrows. The arrows
represent sequence, the sequence of the flow. And then we have swim lanes.
And swim lanes are used to identify who owns which components of a process. So that's what it is.
But how do we make them? Well, a combination of event logs and process mining. So firstly, event
logs. These are digital footprints left behind by every action that we take in an information system
and event logs can be used to recreate a picture of how a business process actually unfolded,
including which tasks were completed by which employees and in what order that they did them. In
an event, logs can also reveal how often the specific events occur, how long they take,
and which other events are typically completed before or after them. Then there's process
mining. And process mining is the application of a data mining algorithm to all of this event load
data and the algorithm identifies trends in the data and uses the results of the analysis to
generate a visual representation of the process flow within the system. The process model. So
why build these models? A single process model can contain a wealth of control,
workflow, information, all sorts of data can be in here. For example, we can capture
what is known as control flow and control flow shows which activities must be completed,
in which order. Then there's also data flow. And data flow shows how data moves through the process
and where it comes from and it goes to. Other things we can look at are performance metrics.
And performance metrics are things like cycle time, processing time,
throughput. You can calculate those for various steps in the process and we can identify things
like bottlenecks and inefficiencies. And then there is resource utilization,
and that really is a metric about things like cost per task or a number of tasks completed per hour,
that sort of stuff that can be calculated and used to optimize things like different staffing levels.
With all of this information that captured the business processing modeling, business process
modeling offers a number of advantages. And most importantly, it provides a quantitative, data
driven view of how work actually gets done within an organization. And this can be revelation for
many different companies which rely on outdated or subjective assumptions about how their processes
work or how they think they work. Now, business process modeling also makes it possible to do
things like simulate change. So this is where we see, well, if we change something, what actually
would happen? And we can model that in the process before it's actually implemented and find out the
results. By changing variables in the model and running the simulation, enterprises can
predict the outcome of proposed process changes and then make course corrections as needed.
And then finally, business process modeling creates a common language.
This is a common language that everybody can participate in for discussing process
improvement initiatives by visually representing a process in a way that is both
data driven and easy to understand. Businesses can ensure that everyone involved
in a process improvement project is on the same page from the outset.
Process modeling forms a cornerstone of any automation, effort or business process
management initiative. Without a comprehensive views of existing processes and the underlying
business logic, enterprises cannot effectively optimize and automate workflows at scale.
Instead, they'd be stuck watching the best guesses of a of a dude with a marker pen. And if you
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