Business Modeling Methods:
IDEF:
IDEF is an acronym for Integrated Definition.
IDEF0:
IDEF0 is a method used in Business Process Modeling, designed to model the decisions, actions and activities of an organization or system. Diagrams are based on simple box with arrow graphics and text labels.
IDEF3:
IDEF3 is a method used in Process Flow Modeling, designed to model processes and documenting the processes and it explains how a system, process or an organization works.
IDEF4:
IDEF4 is a method designed to model object oriented programming.
Data Modeling Methods:
IDEF1X(Integrated Definition for Information Modeling notation) and IE(Information Engineering notation)
IDEF1X and IE types are focused on the actual data elements present in a relational database. IDEF1X and IE use different symbols to represent entity and table relationships for designing relational databases.
Dimensional Modeling Notation:
This is a method used for designing data warehouses and data mart.
Business Process
Business processes are a set of activities involved within or outside an organization that work together to produce a business outcome for a customer or to an organization.
An organization may have specific goals, aims and targets to be achieved. For products to be manufactured or sold or serviced, there are several activities involved with this organization like employees recruitment, machineries installation, purchasing goods, manufacturing of products, selling and servicing the product to consumers/vendors, collecting the payments and implementing government’s rules etc., and these activities collectively are called as business processes.
Different kinds of Business Processes
Business Processes that are within an organization. (e.g. product manufacturing)
Business Processes that are between organizations e.g Mortgage sales by a mortgage company and escrow(payment of insurance and taxes) servicing for that mortgage done by some other company. These are called business to business transactions and are done through application interfaces.
Business Processes that are managerial.(HR and Recruitment process)
Business Processes that are operational.(service calls attended in call centers, information stored by bank tellers regarding opening an account etc.)
Business Processes that are activity oriented: The transformations that takes place in a data warehouse.
BPM Tools
Business Process Management(BPM) Tools are used to create an application that is helpful in designing business process models, process flow models, data flow models, rules and also helpful in simulating, optimizing, monitoring and maintaining various processes that occur within an organization.
Many tasks are involved in achieving a goal and these tasks are done either manually or with the help of software systems. For example, if an organization needs to buy a software application that costs 6 million dollars, then a request has to be approved by several authorities and managers. Here the request approval may be done manually or with the help of change management softwares(e.g. – Serena, Test Director); whereas when a person applies for a loan of three hundred thousand dollars, several internal and external human-centric or enterprise application-centric business processes are to be triggered in order to find out the details of that person before approving the loan. For these activities, BPM tool creates an application that co-ordinates the manual and automated tasks.
Apart from co-ordinating the processes, BPM tools also facilitate the capturing of the rules defined for processes, simulation of business processes, executing the processes in a sequential manner by workflow component, monitoring the business processes by Business Activity Monitoring component, creating score cards for key performance indicators and balancing score cards to help the executives in taking better decisions.
please send Business Process Management Life Cycle spec