Is the out-of-box end-to-end visibility achieved only if you have an overall business process model designed, say to include e.g. order management, invoicing and shipping process ?.
Quite often “order processing”, “invoicing” and “shipping” business processes are kind of disconnected as we do not model them in a single process. The Order Management process model receives the PO, validates, maps it and sends it to the backend. This process stops right here. The Shipping process model kicks off on its own when the back end sends the shipping informarion to middleware and we map it to EDI and send it to customer.
Is writting custom code to link these standalone processes - the only way to get end-to-end visibility ?
Would it be possible to use a customId in each model that use the same reference? like “acquiring order-17548”, “invoicing order-17548”, “shipping order-17548” then you can query the model based on this and have a view from the monitor.
That will be very basic but that could be enough for you. I don’t know if there is a better standard practice
Well in that case uniqueness of this customid will be the key. We cannot depend on the order number alone as there may be dupicates.
The question here is - How do we link the conversations/transactions when we have different conversation ids for different but related processes, like order processing, shipping, invoicing ?. If we pass the coversation id from the initating process to the backend and the backend/process model should use or pass around the same conversation id back and forth till the end to end process is complete. Again this is possible only with the help of the backend systems and not sure whether this is the only way.
It would require some custom Flows, but you could use the XREF database and the pub.synchonization:xref services to relate each of the various conversationIDs/transactionIDs together.
I haven’t tried this since writing XREF scripts in ActiveWorks, but all the same capability is there.
Yes writing the custom code/using cross-ref tables (maintaining some correlation etc…) only can help in this scenario…Do you normally store any key information like matching (PO#,Invoice#,BOL# or unique id) from the Inbound/Outbound documents…that way you can query for tracking purposes.
Just curious…Do organizations generally model the end to end process involving order processing, shipping, invoicing in one single process ? Are there any best practices for enabling end to end visibility in BPM ?
As far as i know it’s all seperate models and ofcourse visibility/tracking is a necessary piece that is mentioned above…Sorry i dont have any more info reg bp for BPM.Did you looked in the Advantage or GEAR doc?
