I am not sure how many of us are using BRM productively in their landscape but I would like to take this opportunity to demonstrate how we can make use of BRM for modeling more dynamic and Agile business processes.
Specially while implementation of MDM , we develop many composites around the MDM Data. Master Data creation needs many approvals and we create business processes in Netweaver BPM.
While creating Product/Material/Customer master records we might need approval by different business roles like MDA (Master Data Administrator) , Sales ,Licensing ,etc and some times the number of approvals or enrichment process involves 10-15 people/Roles.Usually this can be represented in the form of RACI diagram.
What is RACI ?
RACI is an acronym derived from the four key responsibilities most typically used: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Responsibility_assignment_matrix)
Case 1 :Modeling BPM without BRM.
Assume,
- we do not have BRM at this time and we are going to model the above business case.
- The process flow could change from time to time, meaning, For Product XYZ the enrichers are Sales, Supply Chain and Licensing and later business wants to change the approval order to Licensing-Sales-Supply chain.
- We have different approvers for different Products.
We have to model gateways in BPM and hardcode the process flow with in the gateways or we need to write hundred lines of code to get the next role in the process flow.
Any changes at the process level needs development change.Old processes which already running on the box will not be reflected with the change.
Case 2 :Modeling BPM with BRM.
The advantage of using BRM is , we can separate the process from the business logic .
BRM will decide who is the next approver and BPM will route the task accordingly.
The major advantage of this approach is
- Zero Development effort .No need for the process developer to touch the process and hence no deployments needed .
- Business can maintain the RACI and hand it over to IT whenever there are changes
I would say the initial requirements gathering and process design is most important to model dynamic business processes.
In my next blog I will explain how we can convert RACI (given by business) into BRM.
