A business process, business method, or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks performed by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (that serves a particular business goal) for a particular customer or customers. Business processes occur at all organizational levels and may or may not be visible to the customers. A business process may often be visualized (modeled) as a flowchart of a sequence of activities with interleaving decision points or as a process matrix of a sequence of activities with relevance rules based on data in the process. The benefits of using business processes include improved customer satisfaction and improved agility for reacting to rapid market change. Process-oriented organizations break down the barriers of structural departments and try to avoid functional silos.

A business process begins with a mission objective (an external event) and ends with achievement of the business objective of providing a result that provides customer value. Additionally, a process may be divided into subprocesses (process decomposition), the particular inner functions of the process. Business processes may also have a process owner, a responsible party for ensuring the process runs smoothly from start to finish.

Broadly speaking, business processes can be organized into three types, according to von Rosing et al.:

There are other definitions of the classification of processes proposed by

A business made up of many process may be decomposed into various subprocesses, each of which have their own peculiar aspects but also contribute to achieving the objectives of the business. The business review analyzes processes, that usually include the mapping or modeling of processes and sub-processes down to a group of activities at different levels. Processes can be modeled using a large number of methods and techniques. For instance, the Business Process Modeling Notation is a business process modeling technique that can be used for drawing business processes in a visualized workflow. While decomposing processes into process classifications, categories can be helpful, but care must be taken in doing so as there may be crossover. At last, all processes are part of a largely unified customer-focused result, one of "customer value creation." This goal is expedited with business process management, which aims to analyze, improve, and enact business processes.

An important early (1776) description of processes was that of economist Adam Smith in his famous example of a pin factory. Inspired by an article in Diderot's Encyclopédie, Smith described the production of a pin in the following way:

One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another ... and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them.

Smith also first recognized how output could be increased through the use of labor division. Previously, in a society where production was dominated by handcrafted goods, one man would perform all the activities required during the production process, while Smith described how the work was divided into a set of simple tasks which would be performed by specialized workers. The result of labor division in Smith's example resulted in productivity increasing by 24,000 percent (sic), i.e. that the same number of workers made 240 times as many pins as they had been producing before the introduction of labor division.