A business process is a collection of related, structural activities/requirements that are interconnected and that can be represented in a flowchart comprising of decision points and dependencies.
Many organizations follow the industry-specific nomenclature of business processes:
- Record to report: This domain describes the process of managing financial and ledger information for any organization.
- Order to cash: This domain describes the process of receiving and processing customer sales and its entire lifecycle until their payment.
- Procure to pay: This domain describes the process of ordering and processing vendor invoices and its entire lifecycle until payment settlement.
- Plan to produce: This domain describes the process of creating and building products/services and its entire chain from demand to supply.
Business processes are best described using flows and visuals and have several uses, such as training, testing, solution acceptance, and so on. Each business process comprises one or many subprocesses in the functional domain.
The following visual suggests the set of business processes that need to be followed, as per a generic industry nomenclature:
As an example, order-to-cash processes may cover lead generation, prospect identification, opportunity creation and management, order management, order fulfillment, order returns, and so on.
Once you have identified and documented all the business processes of the project visually, the next step is to define their subprocesses.