Business-processes: from value to profit

The history of formation and the current state of the process approach in management are considered. The importance of its role in modern management concepts such as “Organization of production”, “Quality management”, “Project management”, “Logistics”, “Lean production” is characterized. It is stated that procedurality is a modern understanding of any kind of activity. At the same time, until now there is no consensus on the definition of the concept of “business process”. A number of definitions of the classics of management and modern specialists are given, sometimes interpreting this concept in completely different ways. The authors dwell on the issue of the final result of the business process. In most definitions, the result of a business process is formulated as “creating value for the customer” or even “customer value for the client”. The authors analyze the meaning of the concepts “value”, “utility”, “consumer value”. It is noted that these concepts are quite identical to the definition of use value given earlier by K. Marx, which also cannot be measured quantitatively before its transformation into exchange value when the goods are sold to the final consumer. The answer to the question – whether the production process is a process of increasing the value of a business process, whether a product has been created or only a product of production activity is given by the fact of selling products and making a profit. This is the basis for the definition of the essence of the business process proposed by the authors. An analogy is drawn with the definition of investment, when innovations (discoveries, patents, trademarks, rationalization proposals, know-how) become and are recognized as innovations only when their profitable use is realized. The existing approaches to the classification of the constituent parts of business processes are also quite diverse. The authors propose to be based on the provisions of the sciences on the organization of production and take as a basis the allocation of the main, auxiliary, service production processes, the composition of which has long been given precise definitions. On this basis, the concept of a production system is formed, with the addition of management and development processes. The concept of a business system is introduced. All production and management departments at the enterprise are involved in the creation of a “value chain” because they all create the value of products that have use value, value, utility for the consumer, and determining the share of their participation in this process is a matter of accounting technology.