"A set of one or more linked procedures or activities which collectively realize a business objective or policy goal, normally within the context of an organizational structure defining functional roles and relationships."

A business process is typically associated with operational objectives and business relationships, for example an Insurance Claims Process, or Engineering Development Process. A process may be wholly contained within a single organizational unit or may span several different organizations, such as in a customer-supplier relationship (chain management processes).

A business process has defined conditions triggering its initiation in each new instance (e.g. the arrival of a claim) and defined outputs at its completion.

The automation of a business process is defined within a Process Definition, which identifies the various process activities, procedural rules and associated control data used to manage the Business Processes. This automation and management of a business process is also called business process management (BPM).

In terms of implementation, companies have to physically brainstorm at board and management levels, to pinpoint areas, divide them into global categories and then assign each manager to map day-to-day job specific procedures. This will bring them into focus as numerous business processes define desired business results. This is an on-going exercise requiring business knowledge and expertise, along with solutions or tools for implementation. A business process can be mapped by using any design tool, but to actually implement the business processes at organization level, a modern BPM solution is required, this solution should incorporate all these advanced functional capabilities.