Process Driven Information: An Illustration

A company, "Assembly, Inc.", manufactures assembly-line machinery for the automotive industry and uses a specialized software tool to manage its own bill of material (BOM). Every day, sales, marketing, purchasing, engineering, and manufacturing teams input or modify data, documents, and event information that describes various projects, products, and their inter-relationships.

Modification requests or Engineering Change Orders (ECOs) are submitted regularly and require a complex set of operations to be executed prior to acceptance:

• Elements such as product specifications, contracts, suppliers and manufacturing processes that may be impacted by the proposed change must be quickly and clearly identified.
• Product information must be available for analysis before and after the modification, and at any stage during the product lifecycle.
• A modification folder containing all the necessary change information must be assembled to support the implementation team once the decision has been made to execute the change.
  

This is a highly complex process that can involve considerable risk and therefore must be made by experts who are supported by detailed, accurate information. Fortunately, Assembly Inc. uses a specialized software tool to manage its product and project information, making this process far simpler. This tool, called Advitium, does so by using processes to deliver information tailored to the specific user.

For example, the purchasing department is responsible for making a decision or implementing an action on the modification folder. Advitium guides them through the necessary steps and automatically presents all the related information, such as the parts, contracts, or suppliers impacted by the modification. This process driven approach eliminates the need for laborious searching through database-centric systems and ensures that the user always has all the information necessary to quickly and accurately make their decision or execute the appropriate action. Similarly, should the division head be required to provide final authorization to a modification request, both purchasing and engineering information can be presented, along with any other information deemed relevant.

Using this approach, all levels and departments throughout the organization are supported with the right information at the right time enabling them to make the best decisions and act upon them in the most timely and efficient manner.

What distinguishes Advitium from other process management systems is that processes and information are managed independently. Other solutions require decision-dependent information to be routed by the process engine, which disconnects it from ongoing updates or revisions. Additionally, key processes are often dynamic and change based on the outcome of certain path-determining steps. Such changes can mean that subsequent steps require very different information than what was originally envisioned when the process began. With Advitium, process management is linked to, but doesn't contain the information elements. Instead, Advitium extracts and presents it on demand. This allows the process forms to be changed without inter-dependencies to the information, making processes easier to build, manage, and deploy.

With the capability to manage all product and project information, present task and user specific information, and drive processes independent of information, Advitium enables efficient enterprise collaboration and closes the gap between knowledge and execution.