Documenting Business Processes Complexity is reduced when using Smart Processes
“Business Process Management does not come for free”. A business Process Management project requires a lot of resources and expertise. Process experts should make sure to follow the vision of the leadership and top management of the organization while taking care of all procedural details and domain knowledge when identifying, discovering, modeling, analyzing, re-engineering, and monitoring the processes.
Furthermore, with BPMN diagrams facilitating the documentation and modeling, thus it remains a challenge communicating the process model to all stakeholders and capturing all the details of tasks, decisions, and events of the process. In the end, is it really necessary to get to that level of detail?
With Smart Processes, Processes Analysts have a tool that facilitates considerably their work.
1- Finite State Machine Process Model
Process Workflow is designed as a Finite State Machine, as such is much simpler to document and communicate with the stakeholders. The process passes on several distinct states connected throughs steps ( actions ). It is guaranteed that the process is in a single state in a moment.
Automatic state transition depending on the values of the data of the process, is also available, called Business Rule on Smart Processes, for example in a loan application processes it is possible to create e-business rule similar to “if the Requested_Amount<50,000 eur then next state=for_branch_approval else next_state=for_loan_committee_aproval”.
2- Process Design directly in the software
Process Analysts can write process documentation directly in the software, using process configuration tools. They can:
- Create data environment of the process,
- Create process actors ( roles in the software ),
- Design the process model ( the finite state-machine of the process statuses and transitions )
- Configure role access to the data environment sections
- Creating cases of the processes
Using Smart Processes as a tool to document the process for all the above process ingredients brings a big advantage to the hands of the process analyst. As a result, it can test the execution of the process inviting the process participants to create cases and execute their actions of the process in the software. This brings communicating the process model to the process participants in a concrete environment which would facilitate the common understanding and identification of gaps or missing information in the process documentation.
3- Process Documentation descriptive report printed from the software
In addition, Once the process is created in the software, a number of cases are executed by the process participants for identifying any potential gaps, fine-tuning of the process design is done on the participants’ feedback, the process design report document is generated with a click of a button. The process design report is a well-structured document, showing:
- The process description
- Process participants and the respective roles
- Process model ( the sequence of statuses and transitions)
- Process data environment
- Participants’ permissions in the process
