Mapping the business process landscape of an enterprise: study, analysis and comparison of business process reference frameworks

Abstract

Creating and sustaining a competitive advantage nowadays can prove to be a difficult task for an enterprise. This calls for effective business management that will help the enterprises take advantage of every useful management tool at their disposal. The present thesis aims to aid businesses in this effort, by mapping the business processes existing in the each process area and showing how business process frameworks can be used as a reference for this purpose. This study begins by presenting, studying and analysing the business process frameworks found in literature, giving the reader the ability to gain an understanding of the overall structure of an enterprise and its’ operations. The comparison that takes place after that, gives the reader the opportunity to see the different ways the frameworks are organized, and the value each one of them adds. Gathering each framework’s knowledge and seeing how different business sectors are organized, a business process framework proposal is developed that gives the reader the ability to study a non sector-specific business process map, useful for every enterprise. The final part of this thesis is a case study of a consulting company named consolut that seeks to examine the functionality of some of their existing processes using the SAP model as a reference.