Business Processes & Information Systems

Following on from my article on Management Information Systems & You.

What are business processes and why are they useful?

A business process is a series of tasks or steps designed to produce a product or service. “A business process is a structured network of activities, roles, resources, repositories and data flows that interact to accomplish some business function.” (Kroenke, Bunker, & Wilson, 2014) All businesses can have hundreds of different processes, a business process can be sales, manufacturing, or inventory processes.

Figure 1: Portion of Inventory Management Business Process


Image Source: (Jeff’s MIS Study Guide, 2016).

The by-product of business processes is information, that is improvement, could you simplify or make these processes more efficient? Is there a cheaper or faster process, in the same way is their a more reliable supplier? Could you implement technology in order to improve a business process?

What are the components of a business process?

A business process contains a collection of activities, decisions, data flows, ect. Activity transforms these resources/information to other resources/information. “An activity can be manual (people following procedures), it can be automated (hardware directed by software), or it can be a combination of manual and automated.” (Kroenke, Bunker, & Wilson, 2014)

Reference List

Kroenke, D., Bunker, D., & Wilson, D. (2014). Experiencing MIS, (3rd ed.). Pearson.

Featured image supplied free from Pixabay.

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