B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

134 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
business process so that it can be used by a BPM system. It defines the
why (the goal of a business process), what (the activities/tasks that it
involves, along with their input and output), who (who performs the
activities and where the results go), where (the location — application,
system, user — of the activities) and when (the order and timing of the
activities) parameters of a business process.
The BPM system included in a complete B2B integration suite
provides a workflow manager or a workflow engine that works with the
message broker to automate business processes.
5.2.7. Roadmap to BPM
Now that the basics of BPM have been discussed, it is time to understand
how to achieve BPM within an organization. There are several logical
steps that have to be followed sequentially. They are:
Design and model
Initially, the enterprise implementing BPM has to work towards mapping
existing business processes in the form of workflows, flowcharts or a
combination with any other approach. This groundwork helps the
company to identify the areas of wasted effort in traditional processes
and hence represents opportunities for improvement in the process.
As far as designing a new process goes, according to ebXML.org,
there are four distinct stages involved (see Figure 9.10) as follows:
1. Gather Requirements — The first step in designing a new business
process is gathering requirements based on the statement of intent.
Developing the statement of intent helps the business users in getting
clarity about the scope and purpose of the business process. After
the statement of intent has been prepared, users should start the
process of gathering the requirements from all company departments
involved in the concerned business process.
2. Analyze Business Process and Business Information — Once the
requirements are identified, the business analysts analyze all aspects
of the business process so that it takes in the right input and
produces the right output. Several entities including trading partners,