The earliest known definition of a business process comes from Scottish economist Adam Smith. Breaking down his idea to the simplest elements, in 1776 he described a business process in place at a theoretical pin factory, involving 18 separate people to make one pin:
”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 particular 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 sometime perform two or three of them.”
Why should we care about how many people it takes make the pins, or how many steps are in the process? Well, Smith found that by creating a process and assigning the steps to individual specialists, productivity increased 24,000%.
Above image is the workings of an 18th Century pin factory, and the image that inspired Adam Smith to write the first definition of a business process.
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