Enterprise Process Architecture

Enterprise Process Architecture

• A high-level design of the entire business
• Includes the structure, coordination, and technological support of business processes
• Provides a visual representation of processes and systems, giving a bird's-eye view to executives and employees

Benefits of Proper Process Architecture

• Process Ownership: Establishes accountability for improving end-to-end processes across the enterprise
• Strategy Creation: Aids in creating and adjusting business strategies
• Strategic Alignment: Aligns corporate strategies with frontline operational improvements
• Change Management: Helps employees accept new ways of working and involves them in process improvement
• Standardization: Provides guidelines for process analysts to create best practices
• Costing: Helps identify areas of waste and predict the cost of process alterations
• Automation Opportunities: Identifies processes that can be automated to reduce staff demands
• Simplification: Highlights redundant processes, allowing for improved business streamlining
• Process Visibility: Provides the ability to view and analyze end-to-end processes
• Performance Metrics: Embeds key performance indicators for immediate feedback on process performance
• Reduced Cost: Simplification and automation of processes can result in reduced operational costs
• Faster Reactions: Enable quicker responses to changing markets and conditions
• Impact Prediction: Offers insights into how modifications to any process may affect downstream processes
• Training Benefits: Provides a visual representation of processes for more effective training

Process Perspectives

• Process architecture designs and organizes business processes into a unified structure and hierarchy
• Provides an overview of process systems, interfaces, and interdependencies to align business objectives and strategies

Functional Perspective

• Focuses on the processes and their structures
• Processes can break down into sub processes

Data and Dataflow Perspective

• Describes the data a process step consumes/produces
• Inputs and outputs create data flow in the process model
• Dependencies dictate data flow and process execution order

Behavioral Perspective

• Describes the order in which processes must be executed
• Focuses on modal dependencies between processes

Temporal Dependencies

• Start of a process delays a prescribed duration after a predecessor process finishes

Casual Dependencies

• A process can only run if the predecessor runs successfully

Organizational Perspective

• Defines the people or roles responsible for process execution
• Determines agents that initiate process execution
• Defines the organization context for process execution, including human and non-human agents and structure

Operational Perspective

• Defines tools or systems supporting process execution
• Uses a specified set of tools
• Applications consume and produce data through data flow between them and processes

Process Views

• A view is a representation of one or more structural aspects of an architecture

Control-Flow View

• Has activities and control structures
• Activities are process tasks such as service invocations or data handling
• Structures describe task order to achieve a goal

Activity

• An Activity element is the base class for other elements such as Sequence, Flow, and Switch.

Sequence

• Activity enabled after completion of another activity in the same sequence structure

Flow

• All activities of a flow structure are executed in parallel
• The subsequent activity of the flow structure is only enabled after the completion of all activities in the flow structure.

Switch

• Only one of many alternative paths of control inside a switch structure is enabled according to a condition value

Simple Activity Element

• A concrete action such as a service invocation or a data processing task

Structured Activity Element

• An abstract representation of a group of related activities
• Shipping activity must be subsequent to an activity of receiving purchase orders.

Collaboration View

• This extends the relationship between process and service elements
• Represents interactions between the process and its partners

Operation

• Represents an action that needs some inputs and produces some outputs

Information View

• Involves the representation of data object flows inside the process
• Also concerns message objects traveling back and forth between the process and the external world

Human View

• Defines human roles and relationships to processes and tasks
• Process elements needing human interaction are called Tasks
• Establishes role-based abstraction using roles and hierarchies mirroring job positions
• Role-based access control is administered through roles and assigns membership into consistent roles