A business process is a recipe for achieving a commercial result. 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. When the method is applied to the inputs, then certain outputs will be created.

A business process is a collection of related structural activities that produce something of value to the organization, its stake holders or its customers. It is, for example, the process through which an organization realizes its services to its customers.

A business process can be part of a larger, encompassing process and can include other business processes that have to be included in its method. In that context a business process can be viewed at various levels of granularity. The linkage of business process with value generation leads some practitioners to view business processes as the workflows which realize an organization's use cases.

Business processes can be thought of as a cookbook for running a business and reaching business goals defined in organization's business strategy.

There are three types of business processes:

• Management processes - the processes to run the operation, and comply to all relevant requirements. Typical management processes include "Corporate Governance" and "Strategic Management".
• Operational processes - these processes deliver the customer value, they are part of the core business. For example: "Deliver goods".
• Supporting processes - these support the core processes. Examples include "Accounting", "Recruitment", "IT support".

Business process consists of subprocesses, decisions and activities.

Subprocess is a part of higher level process which has its own goal, owner, inputs and outputs.

Activities are parts of the business process that do not include any decision making and thus are not worth decomposing (although decomposition would be possible), such as "Answer the phone", or "produce an invoice".

A business process is usually the result of a business process design or business process reengineering activity. Business process modeling is used to capture, document and reengineer business processes. To visualize a business process, one of the graphical notations can be used such as Business Process Modeling Notation.

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* See Wikipedia, Business Process, (as of Apr. 23, 2009, 21:54 GMT).