Re: [service-orientated-architecture] Is the WS- vision achievable?

[Keith Harrison-Broninski]

The model Raja describes works for some businesses - the classic exemplar being Dell.  But this is actually a special case, miniscule in percentage terms if you look at the business world overall.  Most businesses "building to order" have sales processes that are far more complex.  There is a travel agent example described in Appendix B of the report of the Process Modelling Group from June 2005: http://www.bptrends.com/deliver_file.cfm?fileType=publication&fileName=09%2D05%20TB%20Proc%20Modelling%20Group%20Workshop%20Eindhoven%20June%202005%E2%80%A6%2Epdf or if the link above breaks due to word-wrap: http://tinyurl.com/83huc that illustrates the complexity typical of most real-world sales processes.  To quote: [This process description] takes the Travel Agency closer to real life - but still not close enough.  It does not deal with information provision to the Customer, exception situations, the interaction between different bookings, successive refinement of bookings, payment options/problems, and so on.  All these issues and more are a normal part of such processes - even when mechanized, say by a Web site. Moreover, if we consider a human Travel Agent, the process becomes even more complex, since we are then in the domain of "human-driven processes", where the activities may go off in unforeseen directions.  Consider a very normal situation: an agent who books business trips on behalf of a large company.  All sorts of additional process issues arise, since if the agent wishes to prove their value and retain the company's business, they must effectively embed themselves into the internal business processes of the company concerned, taking note of considerations which differ from trip to trip and even making proactive suggestions based on their knowledge of the company's working practices. To handle such processes properly, you need a lot more than a set of services.  This is not purely an IT problem, unfortunately - it would be much simpler to solve if it were. -- All the best Keith http://keith.harrison-broninski.info John Hirsch wrote: Raja: Perfect sense... SO: From a business standpoint, to START, a customer and a sales rep. At this point the SALES REP interacts with the system, the CUSTOMER interacts with the Sales Rep...(leaving out the old internet at this point, eh?)...The Sales Rep interacts as the Starting Actor. As the Sales Rep interacts with the system (and customer), OTHER Actors, such as The Manufacturing System The Delivery System, et al.. If I'm on the right track we will continue... IF I am anticipating correctly, we could eventually build an internet Interface (for use by the customer) to REPLACE the sales rep and invoke all of those functions as services....IF we build them as services, now.. Later, And Thanks John --- Raja Mohan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: Hi John, I suggest we will take a process that goes across many functions such as Planning, Order Management,Supply and delivery etc. 1. I propose to have a business process ORDER ENTRYfor an assemble to order manufacturing and sales system. 2. sales rep receives the order for an assemble to order item (Computer). Sales rep calls the service orderentry from a order management application 3. The item computer need to be configured from various optional features available for computer (Such as Memory,disk space and minotor size). The sales rep must call the list of features and options available for computer from a configurator product which stored these data. 3. After selecting the features the sales rep needs to know the promising date for which he calls ATP from planning application to determine the possible delivery date. 4. Sales rep calls the pricing to determine the price of the selected computer based on the settings defined in the pricing data. 5. Once the customer is happy with the price and date of delivery the sales rep books order which calls for updating the sales order data in order management as well as the on order data in Inventory master. This may not be a best example of what really happens because there are many other things that happen at the time of order entry. But we can use this as a starting point. Do I make sense? regards, Raja Mohan YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS  Visit your group "service-orientated-architecture" on the web.    To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to:  [EMAIL PROTECTED]    Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to the Yahoo! Terms of Service.