What is a Business Process? Key Components, Types & Examples (2024)

Successful businesses thrive on having standardized methods for accomplishing tasks.

Every business outcome stems from repeatable tasks and activities that make up a business process—from creating brand awareness to prospecting clients to closing deals.

Having well-documented and optimized business processes is a win-win for your business, employees and customers. It helps you stay organized and focused on achieving set goals.

In fact, companies with automated business processes save costs, boost revenue and profits and achieve a competitive advantage. A report from McKinsey & Company shows that automating sales processes increases efficiency and sales uplift potential by 10-15%.

In this article, we will share everything you need to know about a business process. You’ll learn about the different types of processes and their key components. We’ll also share business process examples so you can get a better idea of how they work.

Table of Contents

• What Is a Business Process?
• Why are Business Processes so Important?
• Key Components of a Business Process
• Types of Business Processes
• Lifecycle of a Business Process
• How to Improve Your Business Processes with Visme
• Business Process FAQs

What Is a Business Process?

A business process is a set of repeatable tasks and activities that produce specific business outcomes. Creating standardized processes empowers companies of all sizes to accomplish goals and strategic initiatives. Executing and optimizing these processes is what drives profitable business operations and growth.

Common examples of business processes include:

• Recruitment process
• Onboarding process
• Sales and marketing processes
• Customer service
• Production
• Procurement

A business process can be simple or complex based on the tasks, components or systems involved. The type of processes you’ll deploy in your organization depends on your business type, size, industry, policies and a wide range of other factors.

Why are Business Processes so Important?

Effective business processes are the spine of your business. They’re the glue that holds the different facets of your business operations together, helping you achieve set goals that produce meaningful outcomes.

Here are the reasons you should have a business process in place:

Increased Operating Efficiency

Well-defined and optimized processes help your business streamline tasks and eliminate redundancy. This means your business can do more in less time and with fewer resources.

Consistent and Predictable Results

By implementing replicable processes, you can expect consistent outcomes, as all staff members follow the same workflows or structured approach.

Streamlined Communication Across the Board

Well-documented processes enable employees, vendors and other stakeholders to better understand how things work. It speeds up learning curves and keeps everyone on the same page and accountable for their roles in the process.

Baseline for Continuous Improvement

Visualizing business processes makes it easier to spot bottlenecks and areas for improvement. As your business grows, your company can optimize workflows and scale operations without compromising efficiency or quality.

Preserves Institutional Knowledge

By standardizing processes and documenting them, you can gain greater control over your operations and ​​safeguard your business' success. Valuable knowledge is retained for future reference and transferred, especially during succession planning.

Empowers Employees to Do Their Best Work

Clearly defined processes provide guidelines and a roadmap for their tasks. By defining roles, responsibilities and workflows, employees know what is expected of them and tasks are completed faster and with greater accuracy.

Enhanced Product Development and Customer Experience

Consistent business processes ensure that your products, order fulfillment and other customer facing processes are top-notch. Beyond delivering high-quality services, your customers will enjoy a uniform experience across all touchpoints. This leads to enhanced customer satisfaction, loyalty and repeat business.

Key Components of a Business Process

Every business process consists of several key components. These moving parts work together to create, execute or streamline the process.

Here are the key components, along with examples:

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1. Process objective: This statement describes the specific goal or objective the process is designed to achieve.

2. Inputs: These are the data, information, materials and other resources needed to initiate and execute the process.

3. Activities/Tasks: The specific actions, tasks or operations that need to be performed to achieve the process objective. For example, the selling process may involve steps like:

• Creating and delivering sales presentations.
• Asking sales discovery questions and handling objections.
• Developing sell sheets and other sales collateral.
• Implementing sales enablement training, etc.

A process flow diagram can be created to visualize the sequence of activities and tasks involved in the process. Flowcharts show the start and end points, decision points and any loops or iterations.

4. Resources: These are the people, tools, technologies and facilities you need to carry out the activities within the process. Examples are employees, software, hardware, machinery and office space.

5. Outputs: These are the end results or products generated from carrying out the process. Using our sales process example, outputs may include deliverables like acquiring more leads, increasing conversions and average sales, hitting revenue targets and retaining more clients.

6. Responsibilities: A definition of who is responsible for performing each activity or task, including the specific roles and departments involved. During the sales process, team leads, account managers and customer success managers have clearly defined responsibilities.

7. Controls: These are mechanisms and measures put in place to monitor, regulate and refine the process to ensure it meets predefined standards and objectives. Quality controls may include testing, audits, feedback loops and performance metrics.

8. Timeline: A schedule that outlines when each activity or task should begin and end, as well as any major milestones or deadlines. Gantt charts, project timelines and deadlines ensure processes have a logical and efficient flow.

These are other components of your business process you need to pay attention to.

• Integration Points: These represent connections with other processes, systems or external entities that influence or are influenced by the process. Examples are data exchanges with other departments and integration with external platforms.
• Risks and Challenges: These are potential risks, bottlenecks and challenges that may impact the process, along with contingency plans to mitigate or overcome them.

Identifying these components and how they work together helps you explain how your process functions and can be optimized.

Types of Business Processes

Broadly speaking, there are three main types of different business processes.

1. Core or Primary Business Process

These are the main activities that enable businesses to deliver products, services and value to their clients. Primary processes serve the customer's needs and directly impact revenue, profit and value delivery.

Specific examples of core business processes are:

• Production
• Sales
• Marketing
• Distribution
• Fulfillment
• Customer service
• Operations
• Product development

2. Support Business Process

Unlike core processes, back-office processes don’t generate any income for the business. They are also not directly involved with product delivery to customers.

However, they create a suitable environment for the primary processes to be executed successfully. They serve internal stakeholders, keep the business running and ensure things get done. Common examples of support processes include procurement, IT, technical support, human resources, accounting and finance processes.

The HR department isn’t directly involved in product development, sales or marketing. But HR processes help businesses recruit, manage and train the right people with the skills required to handle the primary processes.

3. Management Business Process

Core and support processes require planning, organizing, monitoring and control. That’s the job of management processes. They coordinate how procedures and systems function within the organization.

Like supporting processes, management processes don’t generate income or directly impact customers. However, they streamline income-generating opportunities and help businesses stay competitive, resilient and sustainable.

Examples of management business processes are

• Strategic planning and management
• Corporate leadership
• Performance management.
• Budgeting and financial planning

It is the job of management to ensure different teams are hitting targets and their goals are aligned with the company’s overall goals. The management team is also responsible for identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, among other responsibilities.

Lifecycle of a Business Process

Every business process goes through a lifecycle. This lifecycle refers to the steps involved in managing the process from start to finish.

The process consists of stages that, if executed well, will strengthen every aspect of your business.

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Let’s take a look at each of these stages in detail

Analyze

The analysis stage lays the foundation for the rest of the business process. It starts with recognizing the need for a new process or improvements to an existing one.

For example, a process redesign may be triggered by changes in the business environment, customer requirements or internal inefficiencies.

Design

The design stages involve these activities:

• Identifying stakeholders, including those who will perform the process and those who will be affected by it.
• Defining the roles and responsibilities of each one of them and how they impact the outcomes
• Creating a detailed plan for how the process will operate. This includes specifying the sequence of tasks, roles and responsibilities, tools and technologies to be used and any necessary resources.
• Developing a timeline, budget and other resources required to implement the process.

Model

In this stage, you create a visual representation of the process flow, often using tools like flowcharts or diagrams. This blueprint helps stakeholders understand the sequence and dependencies of activities. It reveals the steps, who participates in them, where the process begins and ends and its purpose.

When mapping out the process, check for gaps and weak points since you already have a complete knowledge of the process. run simulations to test scenarios and identify viable solutions.

Execution

The execution stage is where you put the designed process into action. The major activities in this stage include:

• Assigning responsibilities to the relevant stakeholders.
• Providing training and developing programs to equip them with the right skills.
• Deploying new technologies and ensuring that the necessary infrastructure is in place.
• Monitoring their progress and generating insights from the process.

Monitoring

This stage is all about tracking the effectiveness of your business process. The goal is to identify any issues or areas that may need improvement.

Start by establishing metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) for each process.

For example, let’s say you want to streamline your sales process. The KPIs you should be measuring are conversion rate, customer acquisition costs (CAC), customer lifetime value (CLV), return on investment (ROI) and so on.

Optimize

The optimization stage involves making improvements based on the data gathered during monitoring and evaluation. This stage aims to increase efficiency and reduce waste, making business processes more effective and streamlined.

Optimizing your global business process may involve streamlining steps, automating tasks, re-engineering parts of the process or implementing new technologies to streamline workflows.

How to Improve Your Business Processes with Visme

Improving a business process requires the right tools.

You’ll need to visualize it, analyze the steps, identify bottlenecks and deploy optimization strategies to boost efficiency and effectiveness. More importantly, it should be a collaborative process between key stakeholders.

Visme has a wide range of tools and templates to help you map and optimize your business process.

Here’s a quick guide on how to improve your process with Visme.

1. Document New or Existing Processes

Process documentation is the process of recording and describing the steps, activities, roles and other relevant details involved in a specific business process.

Unlike process maps or flowcharts, these documents provide more details, including specific instructions, roles, responsibilities and additional context.

Process documents can take various forms, including written documents, standard operating procedures (SOPs) and checklists. Visme has a comprehensive library of templates you can use to document different processes within your organization.

Below are some of the customizable templates you can use.

Company Sales SOP

Optimize your company's sales process and performance with this professional SOP plan template. The visually appealing layout makes it even easier for you to map out, align and optimize every step of your sales operations.

Corporate Human Resources SOP

From employee recruitment to performance evaluations, HR processes play a critical role in the successful operations of a corporation.

Create a streamlined HR SOP for your company using this template. It covers every aspect of your HR activities, including onboarding, performance evaluation, recruitment and payments.

Design Process Infographic

Walk your readers through the design process with this creative infographic template. The first section offers an overview, while the second delves deeper into the details of the design process. This template is suitable for visualizing multi-phased processes or projects, such as promotions, customer onboarding, product launches and activations.

Onboarding Process Infographic

Your onboarding process document doesn’t have to be in the form of a flowchart or multi-paged SOPs.

You can bring your team up to speed with this attractive onboarding infographic. The neat and colorful layout makes it captivating and engaging.

This template is fully editable and you can customize every element using Visme's editor. Start by using your preferred color palette to reflect your brand. Modify the text and add more icons, illustrations, shapes, images and other elements.

Product Launch Checklists

Break down all the steps that go into launching a new product with the help of this professionally designed template. It captures each stage of the launch—research, development, testing, marketing, promotion and more. Use this template to help your team stay organized and on track.

General Client Onboarding Checklists

Develop a smooth and organized onboarding process with the help of this template. This template captures a structured list of tasks and activities to be completed when bringing a new client into a business or service. Use this checklist to set clear expectations, gather necessary information and facilitate a positive experience for the client.

2. Map or Model Your Business Processes

Process maps provide a high-level overview of the process, emphasizing the sequence of steps and major decision points. Process mapping and modeling your business process enables your team to understand the various activities or flow of the process at a glance.

Here are templates you can use to map out your business process.

Learning App Feature Launch Roadmap

This template outlines the key steps and milestones involved in bringing your new product to market. With this roadmap, you can easily coordinate efforts, allocate resources and ensure that the launch process follows a structured and well-defined path.

You can document your pre-launch, launch and post-launch strategy, ensuring your team is properly guided. Beautify your documents with rich colors and gorgeous design elements.

Keep the design consistent with your brand identity with Visme’s Brand Design Tool. Once you input your URL, the tool will grab and save your brand assets in your brand kit. This means you don’t have to manually input them whenever you create a design.

App Development Process Flow

Outline the steps involved in developing an app using this process infographic template. It features an eye-catching selection of customizable visual assets.

You can tweak this template to describe the flow of any process—whether it’s for sales, marketing, project management, product development or maintenance.

For each step, you can add a link to a document that explains the steps in detail using the interactive features in Visme. You can even create popups or hover effects that reveal additional information when clicked or hovered over.

Customer Support Communication Flowchart

Optimize your company’s customer support process with this detailed dichotomous flowchart template. You can easily customize the design to align with your company’s policies and systems for addressing customer’s concerns.

It’s also an effective tool for troubleshooting procedures in other departments like marketing, sales and customer success.

SaaS Referral Program Flowchart

Working on a referral program for your new product? Guide your development team through the process with this flowchart.

It reveals the inner workings of the program, ensuring the team doesn’t miss any steps. You can customize this template for any other type of referral program.

Ecommerce Data Flow Diagram Template

Illustrate how e-commerce shops work with this information-packed data flow diagram template.

You can use this template if you are a professional looking to build an online store or a consultant looking to show your clients' prospective operational flow. This comprehensive data flow diagram visualizes the process from ordering to delivery.

Bank Account Data Flow Diagram Template

Demonstrate the flow of information in a bank-related process using this data flow diagram template. This template can be customized and used to show any data flow and information exchange in various situations, such as insuring your business or applying for a loan.

Payroll Process Flow Whiteboard Template

Whiteboards provide a collaborative canvas for brainstorming, strategy and process improvement meetings. You can use it to document ideas, create workflows and build iterative models.

Streamline and simplify your payroll processes with this efficient and user-friendly whiteboard template.

The templates depict the flow of activities from the administration to the accounts department. Say goodbye to manual, labor-intensive tasks and embrace a seamless workflow that enhances accuracy and saves time.

2. Analyze Your Business Processes

After documenting and mapping out your process flow, the next step is analyzing the business.

Analyze the various steps within your process to identify potential bottlenecks that impede efficiency and effectiveness.

Ask these questions to guide your assessment:

• Which steps contribute to delays in the workflow?
• What aspects of the process consume the most time?
• Where are vulnerabilities to human errors dominant?
• Are there areas with unnecessary waste or excessive costs?
• Can any steps be automated or eliminated to streamline the overall process?

Create a fishbone diagram to drill down into the root causes of bottlenecks or inefficiencies.

Use this fishbone diagram for your group brainstorming sessions and problem-solving meetings. It will help your team visualize the complex relationships between various factors contributing to a problem, helping your team find solutions.

3. Execute Improvements

Now that you’ve identified what’s causing bottlenecks, it's time to make improvements and adjustments to meet your goals.

For example, if you’re improving your sales process, the adjustments may involve:

• Providing sales enablement content.
• Training your salespeople on product knowledge, effective communication skills and updated sales techniques.
• Crafting a compelling sales pitch and proposals.
• Optimizing lead generation and conversion strategies.

With Visme, you can easily enhance your sales marketing, customer support and overall business strategy. Here’s a template you can use to refine your sales pitch.

4. Automate Processes

Automating processes increases speed, accuracy and quality while reducing costs and manual labor.

Invest in tools and automation to simplify tasks, manage leads and enhance communication.

Visme offers a full suite of AI-powered tools to help you automate your business processes, including the Visme AI document generator, AI text generator and Visme AI image editor—all accessible via desktop and mobile apps.

The Visme AI text generator helps you write, edit, proofread, lengthen, summarize and switch the tone of any text for your process document.

Visme’s AI Image Generator lets you generate unique visuals for your business documents. Whether it's an image, painting, 3D graphic, pencil drawing, icon or abstract art you're looking to create, this tool can create it in seconds.

With the Visme AI TouchUp tools, you can change the appearance of any image. The tool lets you erase and replace objects you don’t want in your images, remove backgrounds, unblur low-quality, smudged or motion-blurred images, as well as enlarge images without losing visual quality.

5. Collaborate with other Team Members

When designing business processes, make it a collaborative effort. Collaboration brings diverse perspectives to the table. Team members can pool their creativity and expertise to generate innovative ideas and strategies for addressing challenges.

With Visme's built-in collaboration tools, teams can easily work together to create or edit process documents or workflows simultaneously. Team members can edit, provide feedback and discuss process improvements in real-time.

When working on the process diagrams, you can assign tasks and set due dates to enhance team efficiency using the Workflow feature. These tools help you coordinate team efforts and ensure everyone is on the same page during the improvement process.

6. Communicate Changes and Train Employees

Business process documentation is an important resource for training new and existing employees.

Even when employees change roles or leave the organization, well-documented processes ensure that institutional knowledge isn’t lost. It is retained and transferred to successors or new hires.

Once you’ve optimized an existing process, you need to modify your existing procedure documentation to reflect these adjustments.

Remember to communicate your business process changes to your staff and other process stakeholders, such as customers, partners, suppliers, etc. In addition, develop training programs to get them up to speed on the changed process or tools associated with the modified process.

Use this template to create a training plan outlining how you’ll approach the training program.

7. Track Process Performance and Review Regularly

To ensure that your process improvements are effective, it's essential to have specific goals and clear metrics to measure your progress.

By tracking your performance, you can determine whether your changes are resulting in the desired improvements. It's also important to keep an eye out for any unintended consequences that may arise as a result of your tweaks.

Try using a business process improvement tool like Visme that offers robust built-in analytics and reporting features. With Visme’s report maker, you can create beautiful and engaging KPI reports for your business.

Use charts, graphs, and other data visualization in your business reports to visually communicate complex information, trends and key insights.

For example, pie charts illustrate the percentage breakdown of different components within a process, such as resource allocation or process stages.

Bar charts help you compare performance metrics, such as time taken for different process steps or the efficiency of various teams.

Line charts illustrate the performance of a process over different periods or highlight correlations between variables.

Regularly review performance to ensure continuous improvement and processes haven’t stalled. It is advisable to regularly review your business objectives to ensure that your processes are suitable for achieving your growth goals.

Business Process FAQs

Q. What Is Business Process Management?

Business process management (BPM) is the practice of designing, executing, monitoring and improving business processes to meet strategic business goals and enhance overall performance.

The goal of BPM is to achieve efficiency, effectiveness and agility. Business process management can be applied to processes and tasks that are repeated, ongoing or predictable.

Q. What Is the Difference Between a Business Process and a Workflow?

A business process is a series of interrelated tasks or activities that are performed to achieve a specific business goal.

On the other hand, a workflow is a component of a business's process. It’s a series of tasks or steps that form a part of a larger business process.

For example, an order-to-cash process involves all the activities from receiving a customer order to receiving payment. In contrast, the invoicing approval workflow within the order-to-cash process details the specific steps and approvals required to process and approve an invoice.

Q. What Is the Difference Between Business Operations and Business Processes?

Business operations are the day-to-day activities and functions a business undertakes to produce and deliver its goods or services and grow revenue.

On the other hand, business processes are a more specific set of activities organized to achieve a particular objective. They are a key contributor to business operations.

For example, HR operations may include employee onboarding, benefits administration, payroll processing, performance management and employee relations.

The recruitment process within HR is a specific business process designed to attract, select and onboard new employees. It includes activities such as creating job postings, sourcing candidates, conducting interviews, checking references and extending job offers.

Q. What Is the Difference Between Business Process and Business Function?

A business function is a specific area or department within an organization responsible for carrying out related activities.

Business processes focus on achieving a particular business outcome and the activities within a process may involve multiple functions and departments.

For example, the sales department has functions or a set of activities related to selling products or services.

In a similar business process example, the sales order process typically includes order entry, order confirmation, inventory management, shipping and invoicing. This process spans various functions, such as sales, inventory management, and finance.

Q. What Are the 7 Steps of the Business Process?

Here are the seven steps of the business process:

• Clearly articulate the objectives of the business process.
• Create a visual representation of the existing process.
• Identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies and areas of improvement within the current process.
• Redesign the process to address identified pain points and achieve the defined objectives.
• Develop a detailed plan for implementing the changes to the business process.
• Define key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the redesigned process.
• Making iterative improvements to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the process.

Q. What Are the 5 Core Business Processes?

The five core business processes are marketing, sales, production, distribution and customer service.

Streamline Your Projects & Processes with Visme

There you have it. In this article, we've shared everything you need to learn about business processes.

Now it's time to create your own business process and no better tool fits this purpose than Visme.

Whether you're creating a new process or improving an existing one, Visme provides templates and tools you can use every step of the way.

You'll find templates for creating process documents like SOPs, checklists and process flows. Visme also lets you map, model and analyze your business process using flowcharts, roadmaps, diagrams and whiteboard flow templates.

The best part? You can easily collaborate with your team and other stakeholders without limits, assign tasks, manage deadlines and much more.

Sign up to streamline processes, boost productivity and achieve better business results.