A business process is a set of coordinated activities, that leads to accomplishment of a business goal. This set of activities transforms information or materials and is either value chains that produce outputs valued by customers or infrastructure processes that produce outputs that are valued by other processes. A business process is initiated by events and is able to emit events during execution.

( Own representation based on Hammer and Champy, 1993)

( Own representation based on Allen, 2000)

A business process is a aggregate of the activities and is a composite structure. The term business activity is commonly used to refer the lowest level of the process that is modelled. The activity granularity can vary from a single step (atomic operation) to a series of steps. The concept of elementary process is introduced by Allen, 2000, p. 71:

An elementary process is a process that is triggered by a single business event and does not require further events to complete an execution. The work of an elemntary process is performed by one organizational unit in one location, continously until it is done.

A business process is used for establishment of a temporal-causal order on activities. In doing so, the inspection of business processes is usually executed for identification of activity composition pattern. PDD folows this convention and uses the term business process during the evaluation of HOW the business goal is achieved.

business activity

Business processes form an essential aspect of the enterprise model called business process model.

[2006, book]

Allen, P. (2006). Service Orientation: Winning Stratergies and Best Practices. New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press.