ABSTRACT
A business process is typically associated with operational objectives and business relationships, an insurance claims process or an engineering development process. Business processes can be measured via performance measures such as time; cost; quality; and, hence, customer satisfaction. This chapter focuses on such characteristics of a business process. An enterprise makes a decision concerning the improvement of their business processes based on the performance of the processes in terms of their throughput and process capacity. Since resources are essential for performing the process activities, the capacity of a process depends on the resources that are used in the process. The theoretical process capacity is the maximum sustainable throughput rate for the process operating without interruption. Capacity utilization measures the degree to which resources are effectively utilized by a process. The goal of an enterprise is to make long-term profits; therefore, understanding the cost of the process output is needed because profits equal revenue minus costs.
