Enterprise Modelling and Process Orientation:

In addition to developments in software architecture, business administration
also contributed to the rise of business process management. There were two
major factors that fuelled workflow management and business process management.
Value chains as a means to functionally break down the activities a
company performs and to analyze their contribution to the commercial success
of the company, and process orientation as the way to organize the activities
of enterprises.Value chains are a well-known approach in business administration to organize
the work that a company conducts to achieve its business goals.
Value chains were developed by Michael Porter to organize high-level business functions and
to relate them to each other, providing an understanding of how a company
operates.
Porter states that �the configuration of each activity embodies the way
that activity is performed, including the types of human and physical assets
employed and the associated organizational arrangements� and he continues
to look at the enterprise and its ecology by stating that �gaining and sustaining
competitive advantage depends on understanding not only a firm�s value chain
but how the firm fits in the overall value system.�
In order to fulfil their business goals, companies cooperate with each other,
i.e., the value chains of these companies are related to each other. The ecology
of the value chains of cooperating enterprises is called value system. Each value
system consists of a number of value chains, each of which is associated with
one enterprise.
The value chain of a company has a rich internal structure, which is represented
by a set of coarse-grained business functions. These high-level business
functions, for instance, order management and human resources, can be broken
down into smaller functional units, spanning a hierarchical structure of
business functions of different granularity.
The process of breaking down a coarse-grained function into finer-grained
functions is called functional decomposition. Functional decomposition is an
important concept to capture and manage complexity. For instance, order
management can be broken down into business functions to obtain and store
an order and to check an order.