Talk:Business process

message: This article is nonsense. For example, "A business process begins with a mission objective and ends with achievement of the business objective." is plain wrong. A business process as a specification may terminate in many different ways and some of those ways may involve failure. For example, the business process for handling delivery of goods into the warehouse may result in complete destruction of all received goods. In this event the business process may specify some action, such as clearing up the goods, decontaminating the area and recording the loss. None of this has got anything to do with adding value, completing objectives or anything else referred to here.
Even the following sentence:
"Process-oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos." is totally unrelated to the previous sentence, but they are somehow bundled into a paragraph. That sentence is also wrong. A process oriented organisation may also insist on rigid functional silos, and the notion of process-orientation as being somehow antithesis to expertise monopolies and functional fiefdoms is the stuff of academic fantasy, while 'process orientation' in this sense is just a seldom used buzzword.
Business processes as descriptions, or as what is presumed to actually be may be very different from what is prescribed, and may have nothing do with adding value, support, or primary function or anything else this article babbles about. For example, water cooler discussions are often critical to the operations of businesses. Part of the reason why many office workers failed to quit smoking for so many years was the benefit of 'fag break decision making'. None of these activities are recognised, but they are part of the business processes.
Business processes refer to processes that are no different from any other process, only that in the context of places of work they are expressed in certain ways. Descriptions are made in certain languages, such as flowcharts, bpel, and so on, and they are used for specification, description or both. In both cases they are only models. The phrase 'business process' is usually taken to mean that description or prescription, the model, not the processes themselves. 
Anyway, I could go on and on, but this article is basically complete bollocks. 83.208.165.249 (talk) 20:01, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Total rubbish

message: Business Process – Interlinkaged activities, performed by resources and using information and material as inputs, to create outputs for certain purposes.
:: I have recently added the definitions from four different sources, which are largely equivalent to the proposal above. Is there a real need for discussing about an additional definition? --Kai a simon 19:23, 25 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Proposed Definition:

message: I added the newly-minted buzzword tag.  Passages like: 
Each business process has inputs, method and outputs. The inputs are a pre-requisite that must be in place before the method can be put into practice. 
strike me as excessively abstract and tautological; I'm not sure anyone knows any more after being told this.  - Smerdis of Tlön 20:35, 24 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: The rewrite is better, but only slightly.  The lead sentence still speaks of "interlinkaged activities, performed by resources and using information and material as inputs, to create outputs for business purposes." This still contains vague neologisms which surely count as buzzwords, such as the freshly minted verb to interlinkage.  It continues to strike me as abstract to the point of evasiveness.  I am still not convinced whether this article really is about anything. - Smerdis of Tlön 16:15, 7 December 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  Did some additional work with the intro section, since I was not too happy with it myself. However, since English is not my 1st language, I am careful with this kind of edits. Anyway, why don't you read it and give me some feedback, if it is easier to understand. Cheers, --Kai a simon 22:08, 10 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Tagging for buzzwords 

message: I believe the major facets to address within this article are:
*A business process as distinct from a process.
*A business process may be linked together with other business processes in the form of Porter's Value Chain.
*A business process may be modelled, using a variety of different notations and and perspectives.  From here we link to the business process modelling article.
Thanks everyone, I'm new to Wikipedia, but this discussion has been very informative and raised several significant points.  However, I think we are currently getting lost in the small details of the definition of a business process rather than the actual structure of the article and its place within other related articles.  Or in terms of the content, a business processes place as a defined concept and how it is utilised in a number of disciplines. Anthony Draffin (talk) 12:48, 26 March 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: A wider perspective on the article structure

message: I personally find it extremely hard to believe that Adam Smith was one of the first people to describe processes. Is this statement sourced anywhere? 90.134.26.35 (talk) 16:58, 1 June 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: See "An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" by Adam Smith, Book I, Chapter I, On the Division of Labour. Lafeber (talk) 21:44, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Adam Smith 

message: As discussed loosely here: Organisations the areas of improvement mentioned in the article (Effectiveness, Efficiency and etc) do not include maintaining adaptability. An organisation is both its structure and how that structure behaves. (Even 'structure' is really the result of how a system behaves in response to a type of observation.) Processes must alter and be alterable in order for the organisation to survive a changing environment. Computerisation has increased transactional throughput capability, but has introduced change management processes that effectively ossify the organisation. This is because the overall ability to change processes (the effectiveness of certain management processes, I suppose) has been diminished. So, in short the areas of improvement section seems to be more of a consequence of modern day business thinking and buzzwords, rather than a rigorous analysis of business processes and their necessities. 193.245.34.59 (talk) 08:38, 29 August 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Processes and areas of improvement

message: The redirect Process(business) has been listed at redirects for discussion to determine whether its use and function meets the redirect guidelines. Readers of this page are welcome to comment on this redirect at  until a consensus is reached.  Steel1943 (talk) 07:05, 8 December 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  "[[:Process(business)]]" listed at [[Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion|Redirects for discussion]]