Process Leveling across the entire value chain

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aducci
Posts: 14
Joined: 14 Oct 2011, 13:42

I would like to know the best/recommended way to implement a set of process models whereby the construct of process leveling is maintained, namely the following levels:
  • L0: The enterprise model (value chain)
    L1: Macro processes
    L2: Business Process
    L3: Sub-Process
    L4: Activity
    L5: Task
In keeping with the notion that the L0 process will de-compose into various sub-processes, O would need to relate all processes within their process hierarchy.
I have tried a first pass at defining the classes within Essential which could possibly fit my requirements and wanted to know if there is already a standard way defined to represent this type of process modelling?

the image below represents the planned connectivity.
Image

As can be seen, I plan to use two levels of business capability to represent the L0 and L1 business processes, then the Logical Business processes at level 2 and 3, and finally the Business Activity to show the Level 4 activities. These are all tied together using the Business Capability chains (L0 and L1) and the Business Process Flow (L2, L3 and L4)
At the moment, i dont know what the physical processes would be used for (possibly some help here also)

Thanks
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jonathan.carter
Posts: 1087
Joined: 04 Feb 2009, 15:44

Thanks for your post.
Great question.

I think the first thing that you need to decide is whether the "Process Levelling" is about granularity (level of detail) or abstraction (how concrete the definitions are).

It's very common for process models that work from Level 0 through to e.g. Level 6 to mix both granularity and abstraction and sometimes that distinction is not even consistent. For example, some transitions from Level 1 to 2 are abstraction while others are granularity.

The example you've described in your image shows a consistent set of moves in the following pattern:

- Granularity (Level 0 - 1)
- Abstraction (Level 1 - 2). Note that you should use the "Contained Business Capabilities" slot on a Level 0 capability rather than the Capability Chains to capture this decomposition.
- Granularity (Level 2 - 3)
- Granularity (Level 3 - 4) Although note that Business Activities have special semantics and are intended to be used to capture elementary business processes (EBPs) which define a process that is performed by one person in one place at one time.

I think this certainly reflects our experience when trying capture a "levelled" process model into the Essential Meta Model. However, we have also worked with capturing existing models in less of an "import" approach, where we define / capture the Business Capability Model (using Business Capabilities) to maybe 3 or 4 levels of granularity. So creating Level 0, 1, 2 and 3 business capabilities. Then, we can take each of these capabilities and build a separate process model from Level 0 - 4 (or whatever the required detail is) and relating the processes to the capabilities that they realise.

Either approach requires some analysis of the existing content to decide, e.g. "are the Level 0 processes really Business Capabilities?" or "are the Level 4 processes EBPs".

Hopefully, that gives you some guidance around capturing the logical processes. The Physical Processes capture the information about WHO is performing a process and what ROLE they are playing when they do so. Any process flow definition is inherited from the Logical Process to which the Physical Process is related. We provide some automatic naming of these that is derived from:

- The name of the logical process
- The name of the Actor performing the process
- The name of the Role that this Actor is performing.

These are very useful when trying to understand who is performing the processes that we have defined in the process model. They are also really important when we need to understand how the Applications in our landscape are supporting the business.

Jonathan
Essential Project Team
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