Process+Analysis+Methodology

Business Process Analysis is a structured method of analysis that attempts to provide answers to the questions below. The answers to these questions are obtained by carrying out the stages of the BPA.
 * = **Question** ||= **Addressed by this BPA stage** ||
 * What do we want to do? || Project Definition and Scope ||
 * Where are we? || “As-Is” Description/Analysis ||
 * Where do we want to go? || “To-Be” Design/Validation ||
 * How do we get there? || Opportunities for improvement & Implement “To-Be” processes ||

BPA is used by major companies in various consulting services and implementation solutions. These show that BPA is used in slightly different ways by different organizations but is still based on the same ideas. The private sector readily applies such solutions and Trade Facilitation projects and the public sector can benefit from this work.

=Benefits of BPA= For example, business process analysis can be used to achieve the following:
 * To document implicit knowledge, capture and record manual and sometimes non-documented processes, i.e. process manuals for both private and public sectors
 * To analyse individual actions, documents and data involved in international trade, which jointly or individually involve commercial, transport, regulatory and financial procedures
 * To locate problematic areas that cause delays in moving goods from seller to buyer across borders, such as unnecessary forms and documents and repetitive data elements
 * To identify opportunities for improvements, such as reducing the number of trade documents and minimizing data requirements

BPA may be represented by the five stages illustrated in the Use-Case diagram below involving four types of participants. A list of deliverables and some do's and dont’s are presented for each stage. These together with example diagrams provide an easy reference for a team involved in a trade facilitation project.

The stages are:
 * 1) Establish project team
 * 2) Define scope
 * 3) The “As-Is” process
 * 4) Identify -opportunities for improvement
 * 5) The “To-Be” process