According to the ISO 9000:2015 (2015) standard, a process is “a set of interrelated or interacting activities that use inputs to deliver an intended result (output)”. This general definition identifies the process like a black box, in which input elements are transformed into output ones.
The process approach is a powerful management tool. A system is generally made of several interconnected processes: the output of one process becomes the input of one other, and so on. Processes are “glued” together by means of such input-output relationships. When analysing each process, it is necessary to identify the target characteristics of the output, and the so-called stakeholders; not only final users, but all the parties involved in the process—inside and outside the organization—should be considered.
Increasing the level of detail of the analysis, each process can be decomposed into sub-processes, and so on. This sort of “explosion” should be reiterated, in order to identify all the basic components of the organization.
