How to Approach Business Process Planning

Essentially, when you create business processes, you are programming Sterling B2B Integrator to execute your desired activities. Sterling B2B Integrator makes your tasks easier by providing preconfigured services, adapters, Web templates, and the Graphical Process Modeler tool.

However, the following development tenets should be the foundation of your business process modeling strategy:

• Uniformity and reusability

  Approach® the creation of all business process models in the same way, with a focus on maintainability. A uniform modeling approach increases your opportunities to reuse processes and parts of processes throughout your implementation, and streamlines ongoing management of your process models as your needs change over time.

  For more information about the concept of reusability and other terms related to business process modeling, see Business Process ConceptsBusiness Process Concepts.

• Performance

  Understand how your implementation is designed so that you do not create process models that hinder performance. Your goal is to maintain acceptable levels of functionality and performance as the amount of work being performed in the system increases.

  As you develop your business process models, you may discover more efficient ways to perform a required task. For example, depending on the complexity and size of your documents, in some cases it may be faster to use an XML Encoder service instead of a full translation solution.

  Familiarize yourself with Sterling B2B Integrator performance and tuning recommendations and techniques and build business process models that do not unnecessarily tax your system. Determine how much business data you will need to keep in your active system, and set up your processes to only save needed information. Follow the best practices for business process models.

• Technical knowledge

  Be familiar with the software applications, standards, security, and performance requirements that are related to your integration needs, or have personnel resources available who can help. As you configure the activities within your process models you will need a great deal of technical information.

  Business process models in Sterling B2B Integrator are created in BPML code. A basic understanding of this format will help you work with business process models.

• Periodic review

  Periodically, review the construction of your business processes to confirm that they meet your reuse and performance requirements, and make adjustments as needed.

  After designing your initial processes, you may find that you can consolidate and trim the process to gain efficiencies.