ABSTRACT
Organizations create value by delivering their products and/or services to customers. Where process management is established and working, executives no longer see their organizations as sets of discrete vertical functions with silo-type boundaries. Instead, they visualize things from the customer perspective as a series of inter-connected work and information flows that cut horizontally across the business. Top management in many organizations now base their approach to business on the effective management of ‘key or core business processes’. These are well-defined and developed sequences of steps with clear rationale, which add value by producing required outputs from a variety of inputs. In establishing a high level or core process framework, many organizations have found inspiration in the Process Classification Framework developed by the American Productivity and Quality Center (APQC) with the assistance of several major international corporations. The Process Classification Framework supplies a generic view of business processes often found in multiple industries and sectors.
