From Business Functions to Business Processes

To provide a more detailed view,
these top-level business functions are broken down to functions of smaller
granularity and, ultimately, to activities of operational business processes.
Functional decomposition is the technique of choice. where a value system represents t
he highest level of aggregation. Each value
system consists of a number of value chains
The functional decomposition of the value chain of enterprise E is exemplified
for one particular path of functions in the marketing and sales top-level
business function. Among many other functions, marketing and sales includes
a business function, OrderManagement, that contains functions related to the
management of incoming orders. Order management is decomposed further
into business functions for getting and checking orders. To check orders, they
need to be analyzed, and there are functions for simple and advanced checking
of orders. Traditionally, functional decomposition was used to describe enterprises
based on the functions they perform. As discussed in Chapter 1, concentrating
on the functions an enterprise performs and neglecting their interplay falls
short of properly representing how enterprises work. Therefore, functional
decomposition is used as first step in the representation of enterprises based
on business processes. Operational business processes relate activities to each other by introducing
execution constraints between them. In principle, relating functions to
business processes can be applied for different granularities of business functions.
In case high-level business functions are considered, a textual specification
of the process is used, since concrete execution constraints between their
constituents are not relevant in coarse-grained business functions.
Consider, for instance, the business functions incoming logistics and operations.
At this very coarse level of functionality, no ordering of these business
functions is feasible: both business functions are performed concurrently, and
only at a lower level of granularity does a concrete ordering make sense.
For instance, when the operations business function orders additional material,
then there are concrete activities that have a concrete ordering. Within
operations, an internal order is created and sent to incoming logistics. On arrival
of this order, raw material is provided to operations. In case no raw material
is available at the manufacturing company, an external order is created
and sent to a supplier of the raw material. Therefore, business processes relate
fine-grained business functions, typically the leaves of the business function
decomposition tree.