Everything You Need to Know About Business Processes: Freshcode Experience
January 17, 2025
October 22, 2024
Freshcode
Whether you are a small business owner, a startup founder, or a C-suite executive, a business process can become the bane of your existence. In the good old days, you could assign tasks and expect them to be completed within the deadlines. Nowadays, that is no longer enough if you want your business to stay afloat, beat the competition, or reduce expenses. That's where business process mapping, modeling, development, and management come into play. However, before you give up on the idea altogether, let me explain the basics and prove that business processes aren't that complicated and can, in turn, become a significant benefit for your company.
What is a business process?
The business processes definition reads like this:
A business process is a series of connected actions assigned to specific stakeholders designed to achieve a set goal or produce value.
In other words, it is a set of steps that individual employees must take to deliver value to the customer. Flowcharts of all types are the customary way to visualize the business process, and they may include varying amounts of data. The simplest form is a top-down flowchart, though swimlane and state diagrams are also popular, along with data flow diagrams and value stream mapping.
Let's dive deeper into the inner workings of business processes to ensure you have a full grasp of the concept before you try your hand at business process management (BPM) or process automation. Read on, and I'll provide a business process example or two to help you make sense of the term.
Why are business processes important?
At first glance, it seems that business processes are nothing but an additional way to complicate daily operations and increase bureaucracy. The amount of documentation and reporting necessary might intimidate and convince you against developing and implementing business processes in your day-to-day operations. Before you make the final decision, consider the difference:
Types of business processes
Not all business processes are created equal. Some generate immediate value, while others are necessary for everyday operation.
Traditionally, three types of business processes are recognized:
It might be tempting to focus your efforts on developing and improving core processes at the expense of support and management business processes. However, without them, your business will not be able to generate value consistently and will ultimately succumb to chaos.
Business process development steps
If you have only just discovered the need for business process implementation in your business, this simple step-by-step guide should be enough to get you started. I won't go into details and keep the process generic enough for it to be applicable in any industry or market.
To develop your first business process, go through these seven steps:
Once you have established primary, support, and management processes, you can combine the best of business processes and information systems for BPM, process automation, and a score of other ways to improve your operations to decrease expenses and increase profit.
Business process automation: Freshcode case studies
Business processes can never be static and unchanging. They should adapt, improve, and scale according to your current goals. With the deliberate implementation of business processes and restrictions, you can take your business to the next level.
Every business owner needs to ensure that his or her business is operating as efficiently and effectively as possible. It requires an understanding of the key drivers to optimize processes that will optimize these key drivers. The main task for Freshcode is to reduce the number of processing steps to save time, costs and take people out of the repetitive, boring, and tedious work.
Let's start with our today product development for "Spanish for US". Within this project, Freshcode team is building a platform for online Spanish classes for kids. The client already had a site that was managed in manual mode. And our task was to automate all possible processes including time slot booking lessons, synchronization lesson schedule with teacher's calendar program, automation of receiving payments, payroll software integration, and so on.
Process of interaction with the client has proceeded the following way:
- gathering all necessary information about project expectations
- discussing details with leads
- requirements alignment in Confluence
- preparing an estimation
- creating a brand book with design layout
And so we came to the core developing process. Our team uses Freshcode Portal toolkit to simplify the part of the software development process and reduce overall costs. Here you can read more about the benefits of low-code platforms, including Freshcode Portal.
Just by choosing this approach, we've saved a lot of developers' hours. Time estimation have been reduced from 270-400 hours to 200-300 in accordance with the pre-final version of estimation. Both developers and clients are satisfied: developers are free from repetitive routine tasks while the client saves his time and costs.
Within this platform we develop UI separately for pupils and teachers with individual options and accesses. Another pack for development is an admin panel with all necessary accesses and features as managing schedules, adding studying materials for courses, monitoring payments, etc.
Complex automation of processes has simplified and improved the user experience of all parties. Parents can easily book a lesson, pay for it online while the teacher will get this payment automatically. Every pupil has his own account with all course-related data, as well as every teacher has a page to manage their own schedule and to check if new lessons were booked.
So, in 9 weeks Freshcode team has built an intuitive and user-friendly platform for kids' education that is operating successfully.
One more project related to improving business processes is "Mediafuse". The client wants to create a report builder with a customer-facing dashboard as an upgrading tool for their already existing business system. So, our goal is to build an automated environment of gathering data for reporting, where before several business analysts gathered data within 15+ data sources and built reports for every client manually.
Steps of the Mediafuse requirements elicitation process:
The main requirements were implementing tech solutions for:
- Ingest data from multiple data sources.
- Generate and automate custom metrics.
- Parse custom data set to get only individual data: allowing users to sign in and see only their own data only.
- Get automated reporting over a specific time-frame (i.e. every day, week, etc.).
- Configure and export data in different ways depending on the client's needs.
Tech approaches we've implemented saved hours of BAs work and made processes smooth and quick.
We will be happy to present this case soon, thus stay tuned! :)
If there's only one thing you take away from this post, we hope you understand that <medium>business processes can never be static and unchanging<medium>. They should adapt, improve, and scale according to your current goals. With the deliberate implementation of business processes and restrictions, you can take your business to the next level.
Freshcode has a set of offers on how to improve different types of businesses via business process optimization. In turn, we improve our own internal business processes and review our strategic performance measurement to provide the most efficient delivery for clients.
Freshcode team provides varied digital business solutions to keep, so don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or need for consultation!
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