1. Managing Business Processes
Introduction

2. What is a Business Process?
Activities
Input
Output
Online order
Receive order and notify customer
Verify availability of items
Charge credit card
Request items from warehouse
Schedule shipment and send tracking number
Order received

3. Why bother? Because processes are part of every single organization
Business focus is shifting from products to processes
Process management consulting is a big-time business
Processes have reached the “Executive” level … CPO = Chief Process Officer

4. What does a process manager (or analyst) do?
Understand the process
Design or re-design the process
Monitor process performance

5. These are some of the tools
Flowcharting
Graphical representation of the process
Capacity analysis
Where is the bottleneck?
Cycle time analysis
How long does it take to complete a request?
Computer simulation of dynamic models
Can we predict performance?

6. New use for an “old” technology
Computer simulations have been around for a long time, but you needed a degree in computer science to create one!
The availability of GUI-based simulation software has made the difference

7. What is this?

8. How are finishing times recorded?

9. Two CU profs studied this …

10. Do these start times avoid congestion at the finish line?

11. This is what we can do …
Use historical data to estimate a probability distribution of run times
Develop a simulation model
Run model and analyze results

12. What is the distribution of run times?

13. And this is our simulation model

14. So, what’s the bottom line?
It’s important to know about business processes
and ...
it’s fun!