What is Business Analysis and what the disciplines?

Business Process Analysis (BPA) is a system that helps organisations to operate more efficiently so that they may cut back on costs, save more resources and be of better service to their customers. Using different processes, businesses are able to revolutionize end-to-end activities that make a customers experience more useful and removing any unnecessary work for the business.

But Business Analysis (BA) is more than “just” process modelling, it can be enhanced to the following disciplines:

Enterprise analysis or company analysis focuses on understanding the needs of the business as a whole, its strategic direction, and identifying initiatives that will allow a business to meet those strategic goals. It goes more into the Enterprise Architecture area.

Requirements planning and management involves planning the requirements development process, determining which requirements are the highest priority for implementation, and managing change.

Requirements analysis describes how to develop and specify requirements in enough detail to allow them to be successfully implemented by a project team.

Requirements communication describes techniques for ensuring that stakeholders have a shared understanding of the requirements and how they will be implemented.

Solution assessment and validation describes how the business analyst can verify the correctness of a proposed solution, how to support the implementation of a solution, and how to assess possible shortcomings in the implementation.

Business process analysis is just one technique that is performed by business analysts, and it can offer valuable outputs that have nothing to do with implementation of new software packages or computerized systems, but everything to do with improving efficiency and ensuring that you offer an efficient, top quality service to your customers. How can you achieve this when not by modelling your end-to-end business process?

All organizations, whether they are huge multi-national corporations or sole traders, need to operate ‘business processes’ in order to carry out the day-to-day activities of the business. By carrying out a ‘process mapping’ exercise on these processes you can focus on what is being done, why it is being done and who is doing it. If you are interested in <<Login or Register to see the link>>. The process map can be a simple, static ‘snapshot’ of your business that will help you identify your logical process groups  or it can be a full-blown process analysis exercise which can allow you to recognize your organisation’s strengths and weakness and may help to identify a need for change.

What is a Process and how can the performance be measured?

A process is an ongoing chain of process steps with events and results. The first step to define a process is to identify the boundaries. This is where the process begins and ends. The beginning of a process starts with a trigger (Event) that causes a specific action to be taken by a person, another process, or work group. The ending (Result) occurs when the results get passed on to another person, process, or work group.

Compare Diagrams

When optimizing a process the first question is how to measure a process performance? The easiest way is to use modelling tools and their simulation capabilities to create scenarios for As-Is and To-Be. These simulation tools give you the following performance measures:

Process capacity, Capacity Utilization, Throughput, Throughput Time/Lead Time, Cycle Time, Process Time, Idle time, Work in Progress, Set-up time, Direct labour content, Direct labour utilization, and much more.

The process capacity is determined by the slowest series task in the process, this is known as the bottleneck and can be optimized as well.

Process Flow Simulation Run

The process analysis exercise can help you to identify faulty workflows that are causing bottlenecks in your process which may be costing you time and money, or processing delays that cause your customers to lose faith in your ability to deliver an efficient quality service. Techniques like process flow simulation, Six Sigma helps you to optimize your processes.

Or there may be areas of duplicated effort, for example, you may be capturing the same information in more than one process. Identifying these duplications will help you to streamline your processing to maximize the value gained from your resources.  This identification is easier if you use a central repository to store your information objects centralized and different Stakeholders can access the same set of information just from a different angle

A Business Process Map

In Principle you can think of BPA as a map. When you use a map, you are able to see the entire picture of where you want to go. However, each of those roads within the map is a link that will get you to where you want to go. You can then weed out the roads that may be inefficient with roads that make the trip easier and quicker. The same thing goes with a BPA. Once everything has been mapped out, a company is then able to see the entire picture. They can remove workers or materials that may not be needed in order to reach their goal; customer euphoria.

In Business Process Analysis (BPA), organizations will often look at not only textual information but more importantly process flows, graphs and charts to get more of a visual on the flow of information. For example, there are many different stakeholders (different departments, project teams,..) that make up a company.

Value Chain Diagram

Each stakeholder t in the organization is trained to document everything that is involved in the developing of a project. Each stakeholder will then give the demographics of their department so that the BPA Team t can map out what is going on within all areas of the company. A company is then able to see everything that is going on within the organization and can then analyze each department and how everything works together in unison.

Once the entire chart is mapped out, a organization can then analyze to see where improvements can be made to cut down on costs. They can see where more workers may be needed or what materials they may need more or less of. In turn, this makes the organization run a lot more efficiently and able to maximize their potential in every possible way.

Application Technology Diagram

Business Process Analysis (BPA)  can help business leaders to understand the business and develop resourcing, training and IT- and Business strategies. For this exercise you need to analyse the IT component Application, Interfaces, Hardware as well. It makes also sense to create relationships between the IT artefacts and the process documentation.

The more stakholders are involveld the more you can use spread the costs and create a faster return on investment. If you are interested in <<Login or Register to see the link>>.  Through careful analysis of workflows and business processes you can identify opportunities for increasing efficiency and profitability. You can use business analysis techniques to help you identify potential processing bottlenecks or under-utilisation of costly resources.

Any great organization needs to implement BPA system in order to maximize their chances of being successful. This will help create a more direct route to their goal just like a map is the way for getting to where you want to go.