Creating and structuring business processes – structure and responsibilities

In “Business processes” you record your organisation’s workflows, such as payroll, recruiting or order handling, break them down into subprocesses and define who is responsible for them. Later you see in one place which processing activities, assets and contracts belong to a workflow.

Prerequisites

• Your team is licensed for preeco | datenschutz or preeco | informationssicherheit. Business processes are included in both and do not count towards your document quota.
• Your user group has the rights “Show in menu” and “Read” for “Business processes”, plus “Create” and “Edit” to create and edit them.
• When the module was introduced, the rights were not assigned to any existing user group. Until an administrator grants them under “Settings > User groups and rights”, only administrators see the module.

Open the overview

1. In the left-hand menu, click “Business processes” under “Processing activities” in the data protection view (DSMS), or under “Management” in the information security view (ISMS). Both show the same list.
2. Use the toggle at the top right to choose the display: “Table” with columns, filters and bulk actions, or “Tree” for the hierarchy of parent processes and subprocesses. Clicking an entry opens the business process.

Create a business process

1. Click “New” at the top right and select the entry for creating a business process.
2. Enter the “Designation” in the “General” section.
3. In the “Organisation assignment” section, select the organisations or activate “All organisations”.
4. Click “Create”. The business process is created with the status “New” and its detail page opens.

Maintain structure and responsibilities

1. On the detail page, click “Edit” at the top right.
2. Under “General”, add a “Description” of the workflow: purpose, trigger, outcome, departments involved.
3. In the “Structure” section, select the “Parent business process” if this process is a subprocess. If you leave the field empty, it sits at the top level.
4. In the “Responsibilities” section, click “New”, choose the “Role” (“Process responsibility” or “Deputy”) and the “User”, and confirm with “Apply”.
5. Click “Save”.

Subprocesses inherit nothing from their parent, neither the organisation assignment nor the linked documents. You define which documents belong to a workflow afterwards in the “Process environment” section.

Practical tip

Start with a few main processes such as “HR”, “Sales”, “Purchasing” and “IT operations” and only then break them down into subprocesses; two levels are enough for most organisations. Model cross-links between areas (“Payroll” depends on “Time tracking”) as a dependency in the process environment, not in the structure.

The former “Process allocation” on data processing systems no longer exists: its entries were converted into business processes and linked to the respective systems.