Phase B - the Business Process Level


The inputs to ADM Phase B are:

The outputs of this step are:

As a preliminary to this step it is necessary to define the scope of activity, including what is in scope, what is out of scope, what the limits are and what the financial envelope is. Within this step fall defining the business process, recording the assumptions made and developing any new requirements. The information collected is used to gauge the current system and to determine the return on investment of potential changes. Use-cases are a useful tool in this step to describe the business processes and they can be used to do a sanity check against the resulting architecture.

The business goals driving improvements in the sales process were:

In this example financial and time constraints, and business return have not been dealt with in detail, but normally these constraints would be used to guide the process along the entire way to avoid over-engineering or "creeping elegance". The architect should especially look at these constraints whenever iterating between steps. Also not shown in this example are the use-cases scenarios. However, the process described below does include participants, or actors, of the use-case with brief descriptions of their roles in Table J-1.

For the sake of brevity in this example, it is assumed that the scope of the architectural work would not extend beyond the sales arena, and that the proposed solutions fit within the financial and time constraints imposed by XYZ.

The assumptions made by the XYZ architect during Phase B are:

The relevant business process in scope of this example in the XYZ company is the customer facing portion of the sales process and the supporting systems. This sales process consists of the following steps:

1. initiate the sales process with the customer

1.1 sales person
1.2 customer

2. discuss the customer requirements

2.1 customer
2.2 sales person

3. work with the customer to create a product configuration

3.1 sales person
3.2 sales person's laptop
3.3 sales person's local (LIPR) and central (CIPR) information process resources
3.4 product configurator
3.5 customer

4. verify that the desired configuration can be delivered

4.1 sales person
4.2 sales person's laptop
4.3 inventory control system
4.4 scheduling system
4.5 customer accepts or rejects

5. determine the price of the requested configuration

5.1 sales person
5.2 sales person's laptop
5.3 pricing system

6. confirm the desire to purchase with the customer

6.1 sales person
6.2 customer

7. place an order

7.1 sales person
7.2 sales person's laptop with printer (for fax)
7.3 order system
7.4 customer

8. customer acceptance

8.1 sales person
8.2 customer

The following use-case table represents participants (sometimes referred to as "actors" in use-case) in the rows, steps of the business process in the columns and roles in the cells. Note that this is an example, and it is not intended to be accurate, but rather demonstrative. Constructing a use-case table is a comparatively small effort that will ultimately enhance the speed and quality of the resulting architecture.

The meanings of the various acronyms used in the table, and in subsequent figures, are listed below:

CIPR Central Information Processing Resource
ICSys Inventory Control System
LIPR Local Information Processing Resource
OrdSys Order Processing / Information System
ProdConfig Product Configurator System
ProdSys Product Information System
SchSys Scheduling System
$Sys Pricing Information System

 

  1. initiate 2.discuss
reqs
3. create
config
4. verify
config
5. price 6. confirm 7. order 8. accept
sales
person
greets
customer
listens represents
options with
different
capabilities
accesses
ICSys and
SchSys and
presents
availability
to customer
accesses
price
system and
presents
price to
customer
presents
offer
accesses
order
system
presents
contract
customer accepts
sales
person
discusses
problems
/desires
listens and
decides on
options
based on
capabilities
accepts or
rejects

accepts or
rejects

signs or
rejects
sales
person's
laptop


interacts
with
configurator
interacts
with
ICSys and
SchSys
interacts
with
Price
System

interacts
with order
system and
receives
fax
response

sales
person's
CIPR


provides
central information processing





sales
person's
LIPR


provides
local information processing





ProdConfig

presents
configs to
sales person
per needs,
providing
capabilities





ICSys


provides
availability




SchSys


provides
delivery
date




$Sys



provides
price
information
on a config



OrderSys





processes
order and
sends fax
of order to
sales
person's
laptop


Table J-1: Use-Case Table of Sales Process

Steps 1, 2, 6 and 8 are not within scope of the architecture work since the only participants involved are humans. The other steps are considered within scope since there are computing components involved in supporting the sales process. Note the computing participants are the first set of identified candidate building blocks - Business Process Driven List.

During Step A, the business goals were developed into more detailed business requirements, and these were:

A very simplified view of the candidate building blocks required to support the business process with an idea of location is provided below. This model was built from elements of the above table.

model of candidate building blocks - business process driven list

Figure J-2: Model of the Candidate Building Blocks - "Business Process Driven List"

The Technical Functionality and Constraints level


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