Pattern 14.1 Business Process Improvement

Pattern 14.1, Business Process Improvement, is about applying object technology to organizations other than software. 

Reengineering Business Model and System Requirements. These can often be reengineered directly toward the ideal. There isn t always so much complexity in the processes of human interaction that they can t be altered, although you should proceed with caution through people s sensitivities (see Pattern 14.1, Business Process Improvement). 

The context is action refinement making decisions that implement or put more detail into an abstract (set of) actions. This may be part of a computer system design (Pattern 16.8, Basic Design) or part of the reengineering of a business process (Pattern 14.1, Business Process Improvement) and may in particular be the engineering of the business process of which using a computer system is a part (Pattern 15.5, Make a Context Model with Use Cases). 

Because of the size and complexity of the supply chain network structure, the representations of inter-organization relationships and interdependencies between them are necessary. As the patterns between partners might be different, the process of producing comprehensive maps of the network to identify the interdependencies is essentially required. The next section outlines a business process improvement procedure for e-SCM and identifies some interdependeneies existing between supply chain processes. 

A business improvement effort may be triggered by the installation or upgrade of a software system, a perceived quality problem in business performance, or the hiring of a new senior executive. Although the explicit request may be simply to work on a software project, the analyst s scope often expands to include business improvement. This is part of what the system context diagram (see Pattern 15.5, Make a Context Model with Use Cases) is about—the computer system as one element in the design of a business process. 

Failure to understand the underlying patterns and the reasons for variances — Business people generally do not make enough use of the information they have in collective databases to improve the accuracy of sales forecasts. In a typical retail firm, for example, there is data on trade sales and marketing results, retail store transactions, warehouse and distribution center releases, and promotional results, all of which could span five or more years, only a portion of which is integrated into the forecasting process. 

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