of the business processes. The successful attainment of the business goals of a virtual ... While the integration of computer and communication technologies are ...
Published in the Proceedings of the International Engineering Management Conference, Vancouver, August 1996.
PROCESS MODELING TO SUPPORT INTEGRATION OF BUSINESS PRACTICES AND PROCESSES IN VIRTUAL ENTERPRISES Adrien Presley and K. Jamie Rogers The University of Texas at Arlington Automation & Robotics Research Institute 7300 Jack Newell Blvd. S. Fort Worth, TX 76118 817.794.5900 A major issue in the management of virtual enterprises is the integration and coordination of the business processes. The successful attainment of the business goals of a virtual enterprise depends on its ability to align the business processes and practices of partner enterprises. This paper will present a modeling scheme which supports a process centered approach to the analysis and design of the virtual enterprise. An innovative feature of the scheme is the ability to present federated activity, process, business rule, organization, and resource views of a process. INTRODUCTION Continued competitiveness by North American manufacturers will depend on their ability to participate in an emerging organizational form described as the "virtual enterprise". The virtual enterprise (VE) is a form of joint venture but with important differences. It can be viewed as a temporary alliance of member companies which join to take advantage of a market opportunity. This VE will possess almost no employees or inventoried resources. Each member company will provide its own core competencies in areas such as marketing, engineering, and manufacturing to the VE. Only a small headquarters staff may be required to deal with administrative and management details but the actual work will be performed by geographically separated shareholder joined through electronic networks. When the market opportunity has passed, the VE could be dissolved or reconfigured to address other market opportunities. The VE differs from existing inter-organizational models by the degree of shared accountability and responsibility of the participants and the structure by which companies contribute their competencies through “plug compatible” processes (Reid et al. 1994). A major issue in the formation of the virtual enterprise is the rapid integration of the business processes of the participating companies. While the integration of computer and communication technologies are no doubt critical issues, the successful attainment of the business goals of the virtual enterprise often depends on its ability to align the business processes and practices of partner enterprises. This paper will present a modeling scheme which supports a process centered approach to the analysis and design of the virtual enterprise. The scheme, currently under development, will utilize concepts of objectoriented and agent modeling techniques. An innovative feature of the scheme is the ability to present federated activity, process, business rule, organization, and resource views of
the process. The scheme is built around an IDEF0 activity model supplemented with IDEF3 and IDEF5 models to present to the other views. The paper will first discuss the enterprise modeling architecture which the scheme supports. The particular modeling needs of a virtual enterprise are discussed. The scheme is then described in conjunction with the methodology for the creation of the integrated model. ENTERPRISE MODELING ARCHITECTURE An enterprise architecture can be thought of as a "blueprint" or "picture" which assists in the design of an enterprise. An enterprise modeling architecture should assist companies desiring to enter into a virtual relationship by defining the functions and interfaces of critical business processes, thus allowing for efficient integration of the expertise contributed by each partner. An enterprise architecture must define three things. First, what are the activities that an enterprise performs? Second, how should these activities be performed? And finally, how should the enterprise be constructed? An enterprise is a collection of enterprise activities organized into a set of business processes which cooperate to produce desired enterprise results (Presley 1993). In the context of this paper, an enterprise activity is defined as any organized behavior which transforms inputs into outputs. This paper proposes that enterprise activities are the basic building blocks of an enterprise and, furthermore, that enterprise activities become useful only when organized into business processes. An enterprise must be viewed from several perspectives if it is to be fully described and understood (Barnett 1994; ESPIRIT Consortium AMICE 1991). Previous work in the development of architectures by the Automation & Robotics Research Institute (Presley et al. 1993) describes a five view approach. 1. Business Rule (or Information) View: Defines the entities managed by the enterprise and the rules governing their relationships 2. Activity View: Defines the functions performed by the enterprise (what is done) 3. Business Process View: Defines the time sequenced set of processes (how it is done) 4. Resource View: Defines the resources and capabilities managed by the enterprise. 5. Organization View: Defines how the enterprise organizes itself and the set of constraints and rules governing how it manages itself and its processes. The nature of the Virtual Enterprise raises several issues for the modeling and design of the enterprise. First is the temporary and fleeting nature of the relationship. Companies must find suitable partners and bring together their core competencies rapidly. This implies the need for a representation method allowing for analysis of partner capabilities. The interfaces of processes must be clearly defined to allow for plug compatibility. Provisions must be present for the protection of intellectual properties and core competencies of participants. It has been suggested that the virtual enterprise, or any environment characterized by fast paced change, should be modeled as a series of interrelated component parts (Barnett et al. 1994) or “black boxes”. Black box processes permit information and material flow across the virtual enterprise while simultaneously protecting
the proprietary nature of member organization business processes. Such an approach would also by definition address the issue of enabling rapid reconfiguration of processes by member organizations. THE MODELING SCHEME In this section, the modeling scheme being developed to address the needs of the enterprise modeling architecture is discussed. The concentration of this research will be on higher level enterprise processes, such as would be encountered when configuring a Virtual Enterprise. It is proposed that at this level, a major issue will be the selection of the mechanisms (partner enterprises) to perform a process. Therefore, a representation method supporting coupling of processes and the agent performing the process is needed. Special emphasis on selection and configuration of processes for the configuration of agile virtual enterprises will be considered. The model is developed by progressively specifying the five views, starting with the business rule view and ending with the organizational view. The methodology being specified identifies the following five highest level steps in creating a model: 1. Define and Plan Project 2. Create IDEF5 Business Rule Model 3. Create IDEF0 Activity Model 4. Identify and Assign Resources 5. Specify Business Process Model 6. Specify Organization Model. The following sections will describe the steps and the part of the model developed at each step. Create IDEF5 Business Rule Model A business rule model identifies the objects of interest in a particular domain and their relationships. In this way, the business rule view is closely related to the concept of an ontology. According to Benjamin, et al (Benjamin 1995, page 225), “an ontology is a description of the kinds of things, both physical and conceptual, that make up a given domain, their associated properties, and the relationships that hold among them as represented by the terminology in that domain.”. Within the IDEF suite, the IDEF5 ontology capture method (Benjamin 1994) was developed for this purpose. It facilitates the collection of knowledge about physical and conceptual objects along with their associations. It provides facilities for diagrammatic representations of an ontology. In addition, a structured text language for detailed ontology characterization is present. The ontology model can itself be thought of as the integrated model of the enterprise. Figure 1 shows small part of a model for a generic enterprise. The circles represent kinds (roughly equivalent to class or type) with arrows representing relations. The creation of this model is extremely important as the ontology model will form the basis for the other four views. The model is created through knowledge acquisition methods such as
interviews and reviews of existing models and documents. The modeling scheme and method will provide a limited set of predefined objects and relations for creating an enterprise model.
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Figure 1. Partial ontology Model Create IDEF0 Activity Model An IDEF0 activity model is created based on the business rule model created in the previous step. The use of the IDEF5 model will enforce a level of structure to the standard IDEF0 process. The model is bounded by identifying what is to be included in the model. A process can be considered as a special relationship that exists among objects. In this methodology, however, we define processes as objects. This allows us to capture additional knowledge and make inferences about the processes. The identified processes are used to create a list of candidate activities. The objects and activities are defined in additional detail, with the scheme enforcing some properties which must be defined for the model. This will be done by defining a small core set of properties for activities, mechanisms, constraints, and objects manipulated by activities. The activity model created in this activity will be identical to a "standard" IDEF0 model. At this point however, actual mechanisms are not identified, but rather, capabilities or kinds of mechanisms required are identified. As part of this activity the ontology specification for activities is updated. Properties defined include a description of the activity, and required capabilities. Identify and Assign Resources To this point, the model has been partially instantiated. The purpose of this step is to define and select agents capable of performing the activities. This is done by considering the capability requirements previously identified and matching these to potential resources. In the case of a virtual enterprise, the resources are potential partner companies. The assignment is done through user defined selection rules with the aid of available analysis tools. Once the agents to perform the activities are identified, we can define the performance of the enterprise. Only when an activity and a resource are encapsulated can the process, organization, and resource views have meaning.
Specify Business Process View This step creates the business process view for the agent selected in the previous step. The business process view defines the time ordered sequence in which a process is executed. The reason that the process view is not specified until the agent is defined is that because for the purpose of designing an enterprise, we are interested in the activity view (“what is done”). That is, knowing “what needs to be done?” for an enterprise, we are now interested in the “what can it do?” when selecting resources. The agent approach taken with this model in which each resource can perform an activity any way it seems fit means that the “how does it do it” (internal behaviour) is not of interest until the agent is defined. The behaviour is defined by the set of internal processes used by the holon. For any agent, several process scenarios can be created. Examples include alternate ways of performing a process based on existing constraints, and the tracing of alternate inputs through the agent. The specification of the process model is accomplished by again examining the IDEF5 Business Rule Model. It may be necessary to develop additional IDEF5 models to define information which was not previously available. This process view is specified using the IDEF3 Process Description Capture Method. The method consists of process flow diagrams and elaboration diagrams. One of the appealing aspects of IDEF3 is its relationship to the IDEF5 ontology capture method through the use of object state transition diagrams. Specify Organization Model The organization view defines the reporting and constraint structures put in place. Each of these is defined by examining the IDEF5 business rule. A limited set of predefined kinds and relations will be provided within the scheme to assist in developing this view. The modeler would, by identifying the instances of each kind, complete the model. The result of this activity is an organization view specified in IDEF5 along with additional input to the structured elaboration. CONCLUSION AND FUTURE DIRECTIONS A modeling scheme and methodology to support the configuration of business processes and virtual enterprises is presented. The goal of this research is to develop a modeling scheme to support manual and automated analysis and design of enterprise processes. Automated analysis and design would be supported by AI techniques, especially in the evaluation of resources and alternate ways of performing a process. The ontology based approach is being pursued to specifically facilitate the use of automated reasoning tools. The reasoning would incorporate both quantitative and qualitative criteria as defined by the decision maker.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Research for this paper is funded in part by the National Center for Manufacturing Sciences, the State of Texas Advanced Technology Program Grant 003656-036 and by the National Science Foundation sponsored Agile Aerospace Manufacturing Research Center. REFERENCES Barnett, W., A. Presley, M. Johnson, and D. Liles. “An Architecture for the Virtual Enterprise.” IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, San Antonio, TX, 1994. Benjamin, P. C., R. J. Mayer, T. M. Blinn, C. Marshall, and R. Tye. “Toward an Environment for Collaborative Enterprise Engineering.” Society for Enterprise Engineering (SEE) Conference, Orlando, FL, 1995. ESPIRIT Consortium AMICE. Computer Integrated Manufacturing: Open Systems Architecture, Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1991. KBSI. Ontology Capture Method (IDEF 5). Knowledge Based Systems, Inc., College Station, TX, 1994. Presley, A., B. Huff, and D. Liles. “A Comprehensive Enterprise Model for Small Manufacturers.” 2nd Industrial Engineering Research Conference, Los Angeles, CA, 1993. Reid, L., D. Liles, K. Rogers, and M. Johnson. “A Methodology for Engineering the Virtual Enterprise.” Agility Forum Conference, Boston, MA, 1996.
