Business Requirements and Process

Explain what is meant by business requirement and process.

Here is the explanation of the words - Business requirements - Business process. 

Determine business requirements:

Business Requirements come from key stakeholders within the company and research outside the company.  Inside the company key stakeholders such as business users and the project sponsor provide the requirements. 

If a company only looks for solutions from within the organization they could be missing out on new technologies and methodologies in the industry. From outside the company the possible solutions to met the requirements are determined from: 

- Research: industry best practices, competitor news, conferences, research trips, periodicals, blogs. 
- Evaluation: vendor presentations, proof of concepts, prototypes. 

What is a Business Process?

While technically a business process is defined as set of linked activities that creates value by transforming an input into a more valuable output, SAP differentiates a business process further into two basic subprocess types:

- Application Core Processes

Represent the core business functionality that runs the business operations. These are delivered via SAP‘s business application as part of the SAP Business Suite. These processes are predefined, packaged and can be customized in applications such as SAP ERP, PLM, SCM, CRM or SRM. 

- Composite Business Processes

Are driven by functional business requirements and specifications and their primary goal is to provide added business value on top or at the edge of a stable core. They are either human-centric (collaborative) or system-centric (integration process).

Where application core processes represent business process best practices, composite business processes are next practices that can evolve into application core over time. Composite business processes need to enable business process composition, providing ad-hoc capabilities for quick and flexible reaction towards changes in business or critical business events in out-of-bound situations. 

- Integration processes

Are executable, cross-system processes for processing messages and automating the message flow within the context of a service orchestration. In an integration process the process steps and step types are either message flow oriented (e.g., send, receive) or control flow oriented (e.g., fork, switch, wait)

BPM needs to take into account the above mentioned sub-process types. Composition and integration provide competitive differentiation by composing new processes and applications and integrating them with business partners and legacy systems. Applied business process flexibility with support of process debugging, simulation, embedded change management and the principle of “process design as a process” are the higher art of process management that BPM capability needs to provide.