The Essential Project Forum

Hi,

I'm getting my head around how to model product and would like to open the discussion up to see if anyone else has a view:

My organisation has multiple sales channels, these include:

- Online
- Field Sales
- Customer Service Representative
- Dealer
- Physical Store Presence

My organisation sells a number of products

for simplicity these are:
- Widget 1
- Widget 2
- Widget 3

Whilst there is at a there is commonality on the business functions required i.e CRM/Fulfillment/Support/Billing etc

- the process and systems currently used are different for each product and channel in some instances are different, some might be the same.


I'm keen on determining how you would model this?
Paul

Hi Paul,

Following http://www.enterprise-architecture.org/ ... ymodelling, I would try to use capabilities as a mean to abstract differences between processes.

J.-M.

We can use the Product class to capture the actual products or services (Business Services as some call them) that the organisation produces. Product type lets us take this up a level of abstraction so that we can understand things like where we have more than one Product of the same type. e.g. I could be an electronics organisation with a Product Type of Mobile Phone and then have Product instances for each model that I produce.

The Product Types can be taken up the abstraction layer further by mapping them to the appropriate Product Concept. Perhaps in my example, something like Telecommunications Products.

I agree with J-M that the Business Capabilities and Business Processes describe what we do and how we do it respectively.

As part of the on-going development of the meta model, we're just adding a couple of useful classes to the Business Logical layer. Firstly, we're adding a class to manage the different channels by which Products are provided. Secondly, we've added a new class called 'Brand' to manage the brands that the organisation may use when it provides its products or services.

Jonathan

jonathan.carter wrote:We can use the Product class
......

... Product type lets us take this up a level of abstraction so that we can understand things like where we have more than one Product of the same type. e.g. I could be an electronics organisation with a Product Type of Mobile Phone and then have Product instances for each model that I produce.

We may associate a Logical process to each Product_type/Service. But I don't see how we may express that each Product Instance has a specific process associated to it.

For example I can express how we create "Mobile Phone" from an logical point of view (Acquisition, building, Application integration, ....) but If I want to create an iphone (Product instance) with a mapping capability I will have to use some acquisition process that is different than the acquisition process I use for my "Android phones" Product Instance.

I'm not sure Essential permits to model that except if I create two product_type(s) : one for the iphone (with some logical process) and one for the androids ((with another logical process).... And in this last model I do not see very well what product instances are ....

The Product class has a slot called 'product_implemented_by_process' which relates the Product to the Physical Process that is used to deliver that Product.

Physical Processes have no flow to define HOW they work - that is defined at the Logical level - but describe who is performing the process and what role they are playing when they do, which applications they are using etc.

Using your example, Mobile Phone would be the Product Type and the specific, e.g. iPhone5, would be the Product instance, which we could then relate to the Physical Process (team, process, etc) that produces the iPhone5.

Jonathan

jonathan.carter wrote:The Product class has a slot called 'product_implemented_by_process' which relates the Product to the Physical Process that is used to deliver that Product.

OK.

Physical Processes have no flow to define HOW they work - that is defined at the Logical level - but describe who is performing the process and what role they are playing when they do, which applications they are using etc.

Just to rephrase what you wrote :

• So if myPhone_A and myPhone_B are produced through two different process flow I cannot have a product type of myPhone.... I should define two 'Product_Types', say myPhoneType_A and myPhoneType_B each with an associated process BusinessProcessForPhone_A and BusinessProcessForPhoneType_B.

If I am right, I may then relate the 'Products_Types' myPhoneType_A and myPhoneType_B through some 'Product_Concept' ... hence, if I'm still right, commonalities between BusinessProcessForPhone_A and BusinessProcessForPhoneType_B should be abstracted/factored out in capability value chains ...

Did I understand this right ?

Using your example, Mobile Phone would be the Product Type and the specific, e.g. iPhone5, would be the Product instance, which we could then relate to the Physical Process (team, process, etc) that produces the iPhone5.

The example is oversimplified, we are not building phones

The real use case is about modelling a business service producing statistics/informations for an outside entity. This outside entity aggregates these statistics which some others to produce reports. I think the whole process is not too different from the process used by Hesa (http://www.hesa.ac.uk/) in the UK.

I do not want to model the whole process. My purpose is to model what we do (inside) to obtain these statistics (targeted to outside) -- hence the idea to use the Product hierarchy instead of just informations --.

We have many kind of reports/statistics to produce -- some for students, some for staff, some risk related, ... -- *and* process flows are actually different for them.

I'm trying to find a way in the meta-model to describe this situation as I would ultimately like to relate each statistics 'Product'/'Product_Type (Service)' to physical data we use when building products.

If I am right, I may then relate the 'Products_Types' myPhoneType_A and myPhoneType_B through some 'Product_Concept' ... hence, if I'm still right, commonalities between BusinessProcessForPhone_A and BusinessProcessForPhoneType_B should be abstracted/factored out in capability value chains ...

Did I understand this right ?

I don't think this is quite there. The hierarchy up to the Product Concept is primarily there to help us understand our portfolio of Products in more abstract terms.
Although we can (and should) relate the required/supporting Business Capabilities to each Product Concept, trying to analyse relationships between Products via the Capability Chains is not what we intended, really - as I don't think there's enough in the meta model to make accurate relationships here.

However, at the Product Type and Product level, we can capture the dependencies between our Products using the 'Static Product Type Architecture' and 'Static Product Architecture' respectively. These enable us to define the dependencies between our products - and if we're a service organisation, our Products are our Services - and the information that is required on these dependencies.

Jonathan