Process-Oriented Enterprise Quiz

Understanding Business Processes and Process Performance

• A business process is a set of logically related tasks that produce something of value to a customer.
• A business process defines the results to be achieved, the context of the activities, the relationships between the activities, and the interactions with other processes and resources.
• A business process may contain defined conditions triggering its initiation, involve formal or informal interactions between participants, and have a duration that may vary widely.
• A process-oriented enterprise considers any enterprise as a process that converts input into output.
• Inputs are any tangible or intangible items that flow into the process from the environment, while outputs are any tangible or intangible items that flow from the process back into the environment.
• A flow unit or job is an item that flows throughout the process.
• An activity is the simplest form of transformation and is a miniprocess in and of itself; a buffer stores flow units that have finished one activity but are waiting for the next activity to start.
• Resources are tangible assets that are usually divided into two categories: capital and labour.
• The information structure describes the information that is needed and available to perform activities or make managerial decisions.
• The process flow starts when an input enters a process and continues processing throughout different kinds of process activities and ends when it leaves the process as its output.
• Three key measures of the process flow are cycle time, flow rate, and inventory.
• Little's Law defines the fundamental relationship between average inventory, average flow rate, and average cycle time in a stable process.