Determination of Business Process Types Founded in Transfor- mation and Coordination

Organisational action is performed by someone for someone. Thereby it has become popular to use different customer-oriented approaches focusing on business processes for studying organisational action. In order to address the aspects framed by a certain business process, different prefixes have evolved for characterising a certain business process type. There is however a lack of criteria for distinguishing such business process types. In this paper a notion for conceiving business processes founded in the transformative and coordinative dimensions is used for deriving process types in work practices. By characterising actions performed to produce and deliver results of a work practice, different business process types can be identified. These different business process types are delivery processes, providing processes and condition-creating processes. Criteria used for distinguishing these business process types, i.e. sub practices, are: for whom the action is performed (potential or particular client) and the type of action (operative or development-oriented). A case study performed at a mail order company is used to illustrate the different business process types.