maybe you've heard of a business process modeling you sketch out some boxes and then you get some arrows between them that looks great and that describes a particular area of your business and how it works and then a group of fancy business analysts look at that shift some boxes around and then voila your business has been optimized well well kinda but process models first of all are not made manually by someone with a marker pen they are produced by data mining algorithms that analyze how a business process actually works by looking at the data and it turns out that if you really understand how a business works you can optimize it in some pretty amazing ways so we're going to define what business process modeling is how business process models are made what they show and some benefits of this whole exercise now most enterprises have a pretty good idea of the various business processes powering their daily operations however when they need to ensure that those processes consistently drive optimal outcomes a pretty good idea isn't really gonna cut it now business process modeling usually involves creating a diagram or a flowchart of the steps in the process bit like that with each step represented by a symbol and process models are typically rendered using one of two standardized styles of graphical business process notation there's b p m n that stands for business process modeling notation and then there is u m l and that stands for unified modeling language within these notation systems certain visual elements have universally recognized meanings when used in the process model so for example ovals ovals represent the beginnings and the end points of processes then we have rectangles rectangles represent specific activities within a workflow we have diamonds and diamonds represent decision points or gateways we have arrows the arrows represent sequence the sequence of the flow and then we have swim lanes and swim lanes are used to identify who owns which components of a process so that's what it is but how do we make them well a combination of event logs and process mining so firstly event logs these are digital footprints left behind by every action that we take in an information system and event logs can be used to recreate a picture of how a business process actually unfolded including which tasks were completed by which employees and in what order that they did them in and event logs can also reveal how often specific events occur how long they take and which other events are typically completed before or after them then there's process mining and process mining is the application of a data mining algorithm to all of this event log data and the algorithm identifies trends in the data and uses the results of the analysis to generate a visual representation of the process flow within the system the process model so why build these models a single process model can contain a wealth of control workflow information all sorts of data can be in here for example we can capture what is known as control flow and control flow shows which activities must be completed in which order then there's also data flow and data flow shows how data moves through the process and where it comes from and where it goes to other things we can look at are performance metrics and performance metrics are things like cycle time processing time throughput we can calculate those for various steps in the process and we can identify things like bottlenecks and inefficiencies and then there is resource utilization and that really is a metric about things like cost per task or number of tasks completed per hour that sort of stuff that can be calculated and used to optimize things like different staffing levels with all of this information captured business processing modeling business process modeling offers a number of advantages and most importantly it provides a quantitative data-driven view of how work actually gets done within an organization and this can be a relevation that for many different companies which rely on outdated or subjective assumptions about how their processes work or how they think they work now business process modeling also makes it possible to do things like simulate change so this is where we see well if we change something what actually would happen and we can model that in the process before that's actually implemented and find out the result by changing variables in the model and running the simulation enterprises can predict the outcome of proposed process changes and then make course corrections as needed and then finally business process modeling creates a common language this is a common language that everybody can participate in for discussing process improvement initiatives by visually representing a process in a way that is both data driven and easy to understand businesses can ensure that everyone involved in a process improvement project is on the same page from the outset process modeling forms a cornerstone of any automation effort or business process management initiative without the comprehensive views of existing processes and their underlying business logic enterprises cannot effectively optimize and automate workflows at scale instead they'd be stuck watching the best guesses of a dupe of the marker pen and if you want to see more videos like this in the future please like and subscribe thanks for watching