Optimization of the business process as one of the main tasks in modern management

A commercial enterprise is a complex system within which a complete set of dynamic processes is implemented. In the theory and practice of organizational management, it is customary to use the generalized concept of "business process" to designate the main class of these processes. A business process is a set of different types of activities in which one or more types of resources are used "at the input", and as a result of this activity, a product of value to the consumer is created "at the output". The enterprise itself can also be considered as a process of the highest level of generalization. The implementation of a business process always leads to a change in consumer and/or added value.

The process approach allows us to approach the problem of designing, creating and managing an enterprise from an "engineering" position. At the same time, by organizational design we mean a set of procedures deployed over time, which allows us to form a certain purposeful system of activity (enterprise). Each such procedure interferes with an established or random course of events, increasing the likelihood of a goal event occurring. In other words, the main task of organizational design is to get a clear answer to the question: "What should an enterprise be like so that it can be used to realize the goals set?" The basis of the organizational design process is the development of a formal logical model of the enterprise that meets the target settings of the main interested groups.

Process-oriented technologies are often correlated with the so-called "engineering" ("reengineering") management concept. In this regard, we emphasize that such an approach in the theory and practice of organizational development is not something fundamentally new. Its foundations were proposed by the management classics A.Fayol, G.Emerson, F. Taylor.

In the logistics paradigm, within the framework of business processes, separate operations, corresponding resources and performers are allocated. The execution of a business process is initiated by events (situations), and the business process itself is one of the forms of response to changes in the parameters of external or internal environments (for example, changes in prices, tax rates, dismissal of employees, receipt of goods to the warehouse, conclusion of a contract, issuing a complaint, release of a new product, etc.).

In a dynamically developing market environment, the study of methods that contribute to the systematic and effective change of business processes in the organization deserves the most attention. In the literature on business process management, the following methods of process improvement are common: simplification, idealization, structuring of the quality function, analysis of work cells, statistical methods, reengineering and benchmarking.

As it becomes obvious, there are many tools and methods of improvement. The methods are implemented using a set of tools. To select business processes, the following are used:

Self-assessment. The tool is used to get a general idea of the level of the organization's indicators.

Trend analysis. The tool is used to assess the dynamics of the level of indicators of the organization after the self-assessment.

The "web" diagram. The tool is used to compare the level of indicators of your own organization with competitors.

Matrix of indicators. The tool is used to analyze the need to improve various business processes. The analysis is based on an assessment of the importance of the process and its current level of indicators.

Testing criteria. It is a computational tool that is used to identify the business process that has the greatest impact on critical success factors.

After deciding which of the business processes needs to be improved first, the next logical step is documentation and understanding. At this stage, the tools to achieve the goal are as follows:

• -    dependency mapping;

• -    flowchart of the process;

• -    critical incident;

• -    control sheet;

• -    Pareto diagram.

The third important stage in the improvement work is the analysis of the problem. Some tools used in this stage:

• -    a scheme of causes and results designed to identify the causes of problems;

• -    root cause analysis;

• -    graph (correction field) - designed to identify

links between phenomena;

• -    Histogram - designed for visual sorting

of information about the process;

• -    connection graph (connection diagram) - designed to establish

links between phenomena and their possible causes;

• -    matrix diagram. The tool is designed for graphical representation of data, to identify relationships and dependencies.

It is the presence of dynamically changing exogenous values among the parameters of business processes that makes the process of functioning of the enterprise much less manageable and predictable. The letter, in particular, is expressed in a decrease in the probability of achieving the set goals. Hence, the task of positioning an enterprise in the external environment (in particular, in the market) is primary in relation to the task of internal organization of business processes.

Currently, several positioning tools are known: SWOT matrix, PEST matrix, SNW matrix, BCG model, GE/McKinsey, ADL-LC, SPACE, etc. Most of them are based on the results of qualitative analysis or by the method of expert assessments, which generates a significant number of problems associated with numerous discrepancies in the formation of specific models. In particular, for these tools, clear criteria for classifying factors of the external and internal environment have not been developed, reasonable lists of the studied parameters have not been compiled, etc. In this regard, the practical significance of these tools for the purposes of enterprise management is very limited.

In our opinion, the task of positioning in the external environment is reduced to a continuous search for the optimal (according to a given criterion) position of the enterprise in the general economic system of flows of material, technical, financial, information and labor resources. This formulation is much stricter in comparison with the existing approaches. Nevertheless, mathematically, such a problem is solved with great difficulty, or rather it is reduced to the classical problem of optimal control of an abstract object.

It is important to clearly distinguish between two points of view on the positioning process: positioning as a modeling of the future state and positioning as a management process. Let us briefly explain the second point of view. In the classical theory of optimal regulation, the concept of "state" is defined as a certain characteristic of the system, the value of which at the present time determines the current value of the output value and affects its future. Despite a certain vagueness of this definition, an important point is noted in it, which is often not given due attention. A common mistake is that positioning is often considered as a kind of management of the "future" state. At the same time, based on the above formulation, positioning can be defined only as an impact on the actual (current) the state of the enterprise in order to achieve its target (set, planned) state in the future. In other words, management, unlike modeling, is always relevant only to the present time.

The issues of the counter influence of the enterprise on the parameters of the external environment require separate consideration (this is served by Public Relations events, advertising and other sales promotion methods, lobbying, etc.). In general, the potential of counter influence is determined by the following main characteristics:

• 1.    The scale and socio-economic results of the company's activities.

• 2.    Strategic importance of the enterprise (belonging to the structureforming industry, share in the structure-forming industry).

• 3.    Geographical localization of the enterprise and its controlled structures.

• 4.    Control over the media.

• 5.    The development of the institutional (commercial and social) structure, including belonging to large FPGS.

• 6.    Personal qualities and achievements (including socio-political ones) of the management or owners of the enterprise.

The combination of process-oriented and event-based approaches allows you to build a correct enterprise management model. There are two principal approaches to the formation of this model:

• -    "top-down" from the integral objective function of development to the specific parameters of operational activity (according to the scheme of the "tree of goals" or more precisely according to the semantic graph of evaluation criteria) to build a parametric model of the enterprise;

• -    "bottom-up" in the organizational aspect in order to build a correct system of distribution of work and performers within the framework of the implemented business processes.

Let's take a closer look at the features of the first approach. Process-oriented organizational management technologies are based on fundamental (in particular, cybernetic) management principles. In terms of content and mechanism of action, organizational management fully corresponds to the classical feedback control scheme, which is explained by the invariance of this scheme in relation to various subject areas and the set goals of functioning. For example, the information part of the budgeting system is completely absorbed by a correctly constructed management model, within which the financial and economic component of the enterprise's activities is regulated with the help of budgets. At the same time, budgets are transformed into elements of a standard deviation management system that manipulates planned (normative) and actual indicators.

Precisely in connection with the invariance and practical significance of cybernetic algorithms, one of the most important prerequisites is the provision on the primacy of the management model in relation to other models reflecting various aspects of the company's activities (financial, production, organizational, etc.). In particular, accounting policy should be formed strictly under the algorithm of the management system functioning (with the exception of official reporting forms), marketing information should be collected, external and internal environment monitoring should be carried out. There is also an inverse relationship - restrictions on the methods of collecting, processing and presenting information are largely determined by the peculiarities of the functioning of the management system.

Attention to the organizational structure of enterprise management is practically not paid, it should rather be about ways to correctly distribute work within business processes. This is due to the fact that the organizational structure

(hierarchical, functional, matrix, etc.) is actually only a subjective way of clustering individual fragments of business processes by functional units (departments, services, etc.) carried out by the decision maker. In the case of neglecting the costs of maintaining personnel, the organizational structure has practically no effect on the efficiency of the enterprise. The only important thing is the correct distribution of functions (works), resources and performers within the framework of the implemented business processes, taking into account the socio-psychological characteristics of employees. Moreover, the performers do not necessarily have to be equally localized (for example, in the case of virtual enterprises, telework, etc.).

Summing up, we can note the following. The functioning of an enterprise is a unique poorly predictable (stochastic) purposeful process during which the enterprise moves from one state to another ("shifts in the state space"). The task of enterprise management is to study the influence of various external and internal events on the parameters of business processes and to correctly regulate these parameters in order to achieve the required efficiency of the entire system.