Business Sub-Process
This chapter shows that a complex business process can be divided into parts – sub-processes, and everything that we have learned about the whole business process applies to them.
A sub-process is a mini-business process or subset of activities logically grouped together.
A complex business process can be represented by a set of mini-business processes. For example, a business process of a dental office receptionist can be represented by the following set of sub-processes:
· Patient identification.
· Patient registration if patient is not identified.
· Appointment scheduling.
· Patient’s visit finalization.
A complex sub-process can be divided into sub-processes by introducing a hierarchy of sub-processes. For example, “Patient’s visit finalization” sub-process can be split into the following sub-processes:
· Preparing all the necessary documentation
· Taking payment
· Scheduling another appointment if needed
A simple business process can be represented by one sub-process. For example, the entire business process of an email sorting software can be represented by one sub-process - “Email Sorting”.
We can now give another definition of a business process by saying that a business process is a set of sub-processes, or more precisely, a business process is a set of activities logically grouped into sub-processes .
Since we said that a sub-process can represent an entire business process, we can conclude that for this to be possible, the sub-process must inherit all the elements and properties of the business process.
A sub-process can be defined by the same five elements that are used to define the entire business process:
· Initial state – the state of the sub-process before it was launched.
· Trigger – an event which starts a sub-process.
· Activities – a set of actions that make up a sub-process and transfer it from the initial state to the one of the final states.
· Final states or results – states of the sub-process after completion of all activities.
· Rules – elements which determine the final state of an activities.
As you can see from the above example, each sub-process is unique in terms of the initial state, the result or final state, and the activities that must be performed to switch the sub-process from the initial state to the target state.
That brings us to the second property of sub-process – isolation.
The scope of one sub-process does not overlap with the scope of any other sub-process. They are completely isolated. Any sub-process can be started as a mini process independently of any other sub-process as soon as the conditions for running it are met.
Typically, the internal implementation of a sub-process is hidden from the outside world. No one cares and no one even needs to know how anything is done, but everyone has a stake in the outcome.
For example, a patient at a dental office just wants to make an appointment with a specialist, and he doesn't care how the receptionist does it.
According to the sub-process uniqueness property, there is no point in reusing the same sub-process within the same business process. But the same sub-process can be used within another business process.
As an example, consider the “Patient Registration” sub-process. If we rename it to “Person Registration”, then it can be reused in other business processes where registration of persons is required. Obviously, the set of collected data related to a person will be different for each business process, but the elements of the sub-process itself will be identical.
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