BSSE-Business Process Engineering

Week-1 Lecture-1
 Instructor Contact Details
• Course Instructor: Haider S. Ahad
• Designation : Lecturer
• Office: Room # 116 (CS-1 Building)
• Contact Hours: Mon, Tue & Wed ( 12:30 – 2:00 pm)
• Biography:
I. MS-Computer Science (SEECS-NUST)
II. BS-Computer Science (COMSATS University Lahore Campus, Islamabad)

• Email: [email protected]
• Contact: 0301-7272312
 Course Objectives
• The objective of this course is to make students study business processes and that how they can be
improved. Students will be able to learn process modelling of a software product catering different
scenarios and mapping them into a business model.
 Course Contents
Business process engineering
 Introduction to BPE
 Overview of BP (Business Process)
 BPE life-cycle
 Hierarchy of Business, Processes and BPE
 The Difference between Functions and Processes
 Manufacturing and services processes
 Modelling and charting tools
 Lean processes
 Improvement workshop techniques
 Business process outsourcing
 Re-engineering and improvement cases
Introduction
The first ever business process
The earliest known definition of a business process comes from
Scottish economist Adam Smith. Breaking down his idea to the
simplest elements, in 1776 he described a business process in place
at a theoretical pin factory, involving 18 separate people to make
one pin:
“ One man draws out the wire, another straights it,
a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at
the top for receiving the head: to make the head
requires two or three distinct operations: to put it
on is a particular business, to whiten the pins is
another and the important business of making a
pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen
distinct operations, which in some manufactories
are all performed by distinct hands, though in
others the same man will sometime perform two
or three of them.”

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Why should we care about how many people
it takes to make the pins, or how many
steps are in the process? Well, Smith found
that by creating a process and assigning
the steps to individual specialists enhanced
the productivity.

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On a winter morning in 1907, Henry Ford took Charles E.
Sorensen to Piquette Avenue Plant, an empty building in
Detroit that would go on to become the birthplace of
America’s first mass-produced affordable car. “We’re
going to start a completely new job” he told the head of
production. 8
Ford idea for a new process
• Ford explained his idea for a new process. Instead of one artisan creating a product
alone, everyone was taught to do one of 84 simple, repetitive jobs. With this new
approach to processes, Ford cut the manufacturing time of the Model T down from 12.5
hours to 2.5 hours.
• Not only was that a triumph for Ford’s bank account, it was one of the most
revolutionary moments ever to occur, not just in the history of cars or manufacturing,
but in the entire history of business.
Type of Processes
• .The three types of processes every business needs
• You know that processes are a set of logical instructions to be executed from start to
end, but did you know that there are three types of processes? These are:
• Management processes • Operational processes • Supporting processes
Type of Processes
• Management Processes
• Management processes aren’t as laser-focused on taking a task from start to finish as
they are focused on planning and projecting the future of company operations.
• An example of a management process might be a CEO planning out how best to
organize the marketing team’s time and energy for a PR launch campaign. The process
part would be allocating resources, defining timeframes and checking that the systems
are in place and optimized
Type of Processes
• Operational Processes
• Operational processes concern your core business process. If your in a t-shirt
company, one of your core operational processes is taking orders over the phone.
Another would be getting manufactured t-shirts off to be shipped.
• Whatever your business does at its core, there should be watertight processes in place to
make your business scalable and efficient.
Type of Processes
Supporting Processes
• supporting processes support the management and operational processes. The company
relies on these processes to prop up the planning and doing parts of the business. It’s
processes like tech support, employee onboarding or hiring an intern.
• While these aren’t what the company does to make money, they facilitate the main
revenue stream and make it so the management processes have something to manage,
and that the operational processes are as friction-free as possible.
Problems solved by a Process
• The problems processes solve
• In The Checklist Manifesto — a book we can’t stop talking about — Atul Gawande
talks about how he implemented a safety process at Johns Hopkins hospital.
• It seemed simple, and it wasn’t as cool as the other ideas they’d had, like robotic
surgery. But in reality it was the most effective tool that could have been implemented,
and it was just a sheet of paper.
• Surveyed after the checklist’s implementation, 78% of medical staff at the hospital said
they noticed the checklist preventing an error. And, the ultimate proof: 93% of surgeons
would want the checklist to be used on them if they were in the operating theatre
undergoing surgery.
Problems solved by a Process
• Surveyed after the checklist’s implementation, 78% of medical staff at the hospital said
they noticed the checklist preventing an error. And, the ultimate proof: 93% of surgeons
would want the checklist to be used on them if they were in the operating theatre
undergoing surgery.
• This is the process:
This next example is a more tangible, disastrous
one.
On the morning of the hottest day of the year —
July 17, 1865 — two trains packed mostly with
children collided in Whitemarsh Township,
Pennsylvania, killing around 60 and injuring
over 100.
The cause? Wikipedia has it listed as ‘human error’.
The trains were pulling far more carriages than they could
handle, meaning the drivers had to stop periodically to regain the
engine pressure they needed to continue. With this erratic
behavior, the train wasn’t on schedule and didn’t communicate
that to the surrounding stations.
The driver thought he could make up for lost time and stay on
schedule, so he gunned the engine, taking an alternative track
and thinking that he’d be clear of the Aramingo, another train
pulling out of Wissahickon around the same time.
On a blind bend, the boilers of the two trains impacted and
caused an explosion heard up to 5 miles away. The three
carriages closest to the boilers were blown to splinters, and the
rest caught fire and derailed.
In response to this disaster, North Pennsylvania Railroad
adjusted their processes. They ruled that no two trains
traveling in two directions will share the same track, and
telegram communication with nearby stations was made
mandatory.
A business process is an activity or set of activities that can
accomplish a specific organizational goal. Business processes
should have purposeful goals, be as specific as possible and
have consistent outcomes.
Is "a collection of related, structured activities that
produce a service or product that meet the needs of a
client.
Business Process Engineering
Why do we need Business Process Engineering?
• The field of business engineering developed primarily to fill
the gap between the management and technical or
administrative teams within a company.
• Management may have difficulty translating their plans to
technical teams, who may in turn find it challenging to
develop products and solutions to carry out these plans in the
real world.
Business Process Engineering
• Business engineering acts as a bridge between these two areas,
and is designed to help a company not only develop effective
goals, but also techniques for carrying out these goals as
efficiently as possible. This may require changes in every area
of the company, from marketing to administration, to
computer systems
Business Process Engineering
Unique aspect of BPE
• Another unique aspect of the business engineering field is that it can be applied to a
company at any stage of development.
• Individuals who wish to form a new business can use these principles to select the
best product or market, or to refine an existing idea.
• It can also be used to improve an existing business. This may mean increasing profit
or cutting cost, but it can also refer to improving employee satisfaction or retention
rates.
• This process may involve making small changing or incorporating new technologies,
or may require a complete redesign of the company and all its processes.
Business Process Engineering and software
engineering
• Of the art in many software engineering methods approaches to requirements
engineering involve a detailed modeling of different aspects such as system structure
data or behavior these models are an essential means of
• communication between system developers and expert users
• furthermore they are the basis from which system design and implementation are
derived in later stages of the development process
• as the quality of requirements specifications is a decisive factor for software quality
and correction costs day by day much effort is usually spent on system modeling in
the early stages of the software development process.
• however the models developed quite often only aim at providing the system
developer with a better understanding of the system to be developed rather than
producing a set of unambiguous consistent and semantically integrated documents
which support an at least half automated derivation of subsequent results in the
development process such as design or implementation documents thus the high e
ort spent on modeling is often