Business Architecture
FlitePlan has a model-driven architecture (MDA)* in which software components reflect business concepts such as resources, processes, events, organizations, roles, et cetera. It uses the resource transform and resource, event, agent (REA) concepts, pioneered by Chris Marshall and William McCarthy in the 1980s, which have gained wide acceptance and have been successfully applied in many enterprises. The REA approach treats an information system as a virtual representation of the actual business, in which software objects directly model real-world business objects such as parties, resources and processes: It describes how corporate and individual parties (agents) acquire and use goods, services and money (resources) - to create value via purchase, sales, manufacture, service and other business processes (events).
* Refer to Wikipedia and Google for more information on the acronyms and phrases highlighted in bold and italic fonts
Process, Organization and Role
Business processes guide the flow of work among organizations and individuals to ensure their accuracy, efficiency and security. A purchase of the wrong item from an inferior supplier with incorrect delivery date and inadequate cost control is unfortunately all too common. Ad hoc controls introduced to improve the situation add overhead costs and often fail over time. Workflow management (WfM) and role based access control (RBAC) features help to ensure that steps in the business process are done when required by properly authorised users. To achieve this, each task in the process is identified, allocated to an organizational role, and joined to other tasks by business rules. For example, a process might be started by a request for a product by a customer – a sales clerk checks if stock is available with the inventory controller, responding to the customer with a quotation or an apology. The customer then evaluates the proposal, perhaps requesting payment terms - which are checked by the finance department - alternatively paying upfront. When credit is allowed or payment is made, the product can be ordered and shipped. The business process diagram separates these tasks into the organizations (customer) and roles (sales, finance and inventory) authorised to do them. FlitePlan uses this information to route tasks in sequence only to users that have been assigned the appropriate role(s).
Resource and Value
A resource is anything of value to an organization, and FlitePlan measures its value for planning, operational and accounting purposes. A business process consumes, produces and/or modifies one or more resources, intending to increase their overall value. Financial value is measured by accounting systems, which typically fail to provide the non-financial planning, operational and intelligence needs of an enterprise. FlitePlan data services enable comprehensive, consistent, flexible and extensible models of each resource including its financial and physical values. Furthermore, a resource may have user-defined attributes. For example, a clothing company may wish to record the style, material, colour, size and designer of its products. The attributes are added without any change to the database structure, may be used in posting data to the warehouse, and for other purposes such as online searches. The FlitePlan search facility allows both exact matches and fuzzy search to find close matches.
Application services present and update data in response to requests by a business process. For example, the quotation step of a sale process might use one service to calculate the price of each item given its quantity, due date, location, pack size and currency; another service to find out if and when inventory is available for shipping; yet another to calculate the shipment cost; and finally use a report service to format the quote to be sent back to the customer. The services are accessible to clients via the internet and directly to each other on a server. Complex requests can be factored into a set of simple operations, and advanced transaction management ensures that a multi-stage request is either completed or aborted in its entirety.
The persistence service stores the state of a business in one or more databases with functions to create, read, update and delete (CRUD) data that describes business objects such as customers, products and finance. The service transforms business objects used by applications to and from database records, and maps between their relational and object-oriented forms. This is completely transparent to the end user and application programmer, but allows for customised mapping when needed. For example, an object representing a product may reference and update data in many tables in several databases at different locations, but to the user it appears to be a single entity. The service also harmonizes data from all sources to eliminate differences in their names, representation, precision et cetera. Database dates and numeric values, which may be in many formats in the databases, are converted to and from ISO formats for processing by applications. To further facilitate international usage and trade, FlitePlan is preloaded with data for each country, currency, language, location and unit of measure in the UN/CEFACT, ISO and SI standards. Flexible tax tables allow sales, value added, pay as you earn and other income tax schemes to be defined and used for any jurisdiction. Product price lists are defined by date, quantity, unit of measure, location and currency for all types of contract, and each contract can have multiple suppliers and customers. These features eliminate much of the complexity of legacy applications while retaining the very high performance available from modern relational databases.
Web services also allow third party services to be used – services offered by Google include satellite images, maps and search, for example, which may be accessed by the application. Other companies offer product data, customer credit ratings, foreign exchange rates, shipping options and other services that can be used by the process. This information is available free of charge and by subscription in many different formats, but it is presented by FlitePlan in a consistent form to applications.
Business Intelligence
Business is a collection of activities carried on for a purpose, be it science, technology, commerce, industry, law, government, defence, et cetera. The communication facility serving the conduct of a business (in the broad sense) may be referred to as an intelligence system. The notion of intelligence is also defined here, in a more general sense, as the ability to apprehend the interrelationships of presented facts in such a way as to guide action towards a desired goal. Business intelligence (BI) refers to technologies, applications and practices for the collection, integration, analysis, and presentation of business information and sometimes to the information itself. The purpose of business intelligence is to support better decision-making, so also described as a decision support system (DSS) [Wikipedia].
In changing the state of a resource a process changes its financial and operational value. For example, receipt of an item into a store increases the quantity on hand and inventory asset value. FlitePlan uses a multidimensional data warehouse to provide historical, current, and predictive business information directly from operational data in real time. Data is partitioned in the data warehouse into facts, which are generally numeric values, and dimensions, which are properties that give context to the facts. For example, a sale is measured by quantity and price values (facts) and unit of measure, currency, date, location, and product, customer and salesperson identities (dimensions). Other dimensions may be used for actual, projected, and budgeted values, et cetera. Benefits of the dimensional approach are that it is easy for managers to understand and to use, and data retrieval is very fast so reporting and charting tools can rapidly extract, analyse and present information from the data warehouse.
Posting rules specify how values are to be recorded in the data warehouse. They are defined in the application services and are applied to all processes that use the services. For example, inventory used in production or maintenance, shipped to customers, or issued as marketing samples are subject to the same posting rules – thus avoiding many of the problems associated with traditional accounting systems – where each type of transaction may have different logic. While most rules are standardised to conform to generally accepted accounting principles, other rules may be adapted or added for specific information needs. For example, commission might be accrued to a salesperson for each sale without affecting the financial ledger. Such information can optionally be included in or excluded from reports at the user’s choice. This innovative approach to data warehousing removes the need for separate general ledger, accounts receivable and payable, inventory and work in process control, and other systems.