B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

130 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
A good business process is designed around three types of activities
required for continuous improvement:
1. Advanced concepts — Big-step improvements encompassing strategic
initiatives, major projects and key business process innovations.
2. Incremental improvement — Small-step improvements undertaken
continuously by cross-functional or natural work teams as part of
their normal day-to-day activities and job functions.
3. Quality assurance — Establishes a sustainable base and standardizes
process improvement, by rewriting procedures and conducting training
in the new way of operation, so that any improvements that are
made to the system are not lost over time but remain as standard
operating practice.
5.2.2. Participants
The participants in a business process include applications, humans,
trading partners, other processes and systems, which can be either static
(these are known during the modeling of a business process) or dynamic
(these are determined at the run-time of a business process). Emarketplaces
offer a perfect example in which business processes have
to deal with dynamic partners, as the buying or selling party is usually
not known beforehand. The participants are the resources for a process.
5.2.3. Activities
Activities are units of work that are performed within a process. Active
or passive resources are required to perform these activities. The same
activity may be enacted in different processes and on different objects.
Thus, activities should be designed in a reusable fashion.
5.2.4. Business transactions
A business transaction consists of exchange of messages resulting in a
consistent change in the state of the business. Business processes can be
composed of one or several business transactions. B2B transactions involve
multiple enterprises and resources (such as databases, transactional