Business Processes model
By specifying Business Processes in a strict way, computers can be told how to roll along a transaction from begin to end. See Figure 6-2 for an example: a contractor wants to know if a supplier can supply him with certain parts, he receives back the items the supplier has to offer, orders a certain part and receives back a confirmation of the order. The same business process is used in case a supervisor notices a shortage of certain parts on the building sites and orders an additional shipment from the company warehouse (the second example mentioned in the section called Possible advantages in Chapter 3). Figure 6-3 shows a second possible business process, this time a supervisor needing information about a specific part of a project, possibly to change the completion percentage recorded for that part in the company records from 60% to 100%. Or to find out which subcontractor installed the faulty window in order to send him a repair order.
To get basic functionality, the following two items are needed:
A single step of a business process, like update info or select specific part.
An entire business process, consisting of a number of steps. Both Use Cases (Figure 6-2 and Figure 6-3) are considered one business process.
The complete model is shown in Figure 6-4.
