Dragon1 Standard: Business Process Orientation

The concept of Business Process Orientation is one of the most important concepts used in almost any enterprise or organization.

This concept places business processes as a key building block in the organization, together with performance indicators and responsibilities. A lot of success in an organization depends on how well business processes are designed, implemented and executed.

We will now first discuss the most important element of the concept: a business process.

What is a Business Process?

This definition means that if activities are not aligned, there is no business process. The better the activities are aligned, the more efficient and effective you use your resources to produce products and realize goals.

Process Meta-Model Diagram.

In many organizations architects only model and visualize the dependency of processes to applications, but processes without activities are hollow things. You need to know the business activities that are dependent on modules in software applications. Only then you can really make processes lean, efficient or deduplicate work or allocate work to the correct resources.

If you have an overview of processes and a process flow diagram per key process, you can manage your processes: Plan, Organize, Lead, Control and Staff.

An enterprise must be aware of and constantly improve the maturity of the business processes in its businesses. If a business process has too low of maturity with regards to the strategy, it may lower the service level in many other processes too.

A business function is unlike a business process. A business function is the grouping of all business activities focused on realizing a common goal and does not have start and stop events, like the grouping of all sales activities. A process is a flow of a chain of activities that has a start and stop event and input and output. A small company would often have only one sales process: the company's sales process. Large companies will have many sales processes, for instance, tailored to market segments: enterprise sales and consumer sales.

Every professional organization needs to have a process landscape (a visual overview of all the processes) and per key process a process flow diagram. With that you enable yourself to manage the processes.

Example Business Process

Below you see an example business process model, compliant with the Dragon1 modeling language:

Process Model Diagram.

Dragon1 Process Symbols

Dragon1 process symbols are developed with this in mind: you need to be able to visualize and analyze the complexity and problems in a process. And also you need to be to model and design a simple solution.

And if anyhow possible have a very communicable diagram of a process.

The Dragon1 process symbols are:

Dragon1 symbol	Dragon1 term	Definition
	Lane	A grouping of certain aspects of a process, for instance all the tasks and decisions taken by a client in the process.
	Input and Output	Materials, Goods, Products, Services and Data that enter or exit the process. For example, a sick patient and a cure can be the input of a process and a healthy patient and a bill can be the output of a process.
	Event	A timeless activity that occurs to start or stop things.
	Trigger	A reaction to an event that fire starts execution of an activity, task or action.
	Actor	An internal or external entity that interacts with other entities. An actor specifies a role played by an entity (user or any other system) that interacts with a subject. An actor can be a person, system, or application responsible for executing the activity, task or action. For example: a business manager, a CRM software application or a patient.
	Resource	Any kind of entity that executes an activity, task or action or is used in it. For example a phone, a software application or a car.
	Process	A structured and time bounded flow of activities where activities are aligned to make optimal use of resources.
	Process Step	A part of the flow of activities in a process. For example: preparing operation.
	Activity	A piece of work or a set of tasks that can be carried out by different people at different times, with no fixed deadline. For instance: the intake of a patient.
	Task	A time-bound set of actions that often is or can be carried in one go by one person. With tasks, it is important that they are carried out before the deadline. An example of a task is a skilled operation like giving medicine to a patient.
	Action	An atomic piece of work. For instance: checking if a medicine is not out of date.
	Decision	A conclusion or resolution after consideration. For instance: if a patient can't walk, fetch a wheelchair for him.
	Indicator	An indicator is a measurable value. A Key Performance Indicator demonstrates how effectively a company is achieving key business objectives. Organizations use KPIs to evaluate success in reaching targets. Example KPIs are: average time to serve a client, production costs per unit, IT incidents this month, and sales year to date.
	Success Factor	A success factor is a situation or condition. A Critical Success Factor (CSF) is a vital (pre) condition for a mission or strategy to be successful in relation to strategic objectives. CSFs are different from KPIs. CSFs are strategic, and KPIs are managerial. Example CSFs are: Attracting New Customers (if a strategic objective is to gain a market share of 25%) and Increasing knowledge of electric engines and green energy (if a strategic objective is to introduce a new electric car to the market.
	Sequence Flow	A connection or relationship between processes, activities, tasks or actions, meaning that one follows after the other.
	Message Flow	A connection or relationship between processes, activities, tasks or actions, meaning that one send a message to the other.
	Association	A connection or relationship between processes, activities, tasks or actions, with no other meaning than they are related or connected.

Dragon1 compared with other Modeling Languages on Processes:

Communicable Diagrams

Often process models using wireframe shapes are very hard to read and understand for non-process-modelers. Therefore Dragon1 promotes the creation of informal diagrams or artist impressions of process models.

Below you see such an example of an informal diagram. Without knowledge of process modeling most directors, managers, project workers and other stakeholders understand the business process in a short period of time

Process Model Artist Impression.

Here on the Dragon1 platform you can create a formal model and publish it to the content viewer. In the Content Viewer, you can change the visualization of the process to draw, sketch and artist impression with one click of a button.

Isometric Process Models

On Dragon1, you can make use of 3D Isometric shapes and also create your own shape collections.

Isometric Process Model.

Human Oriented Process

In many countries people are not used to reading. They need pictures for communication. In the case of communicating a business process, using a HOP diagram is most efficient. Below you see a HOP diagram. Every situation in the process is depicted with photographs taken, and placed in the squares. By doing this everyone working in the process can be instructed very well on how the process changes.

HOP Human-Oriented Process diagram.