Revisiting Process Modeling

Peter Burrows, CIO emeritus of adidas Group, opened the recent ARTS Users’ Meeting with a presentation entitled, “Developing Process Documentation to Align Business and IT at adidas.”
It was not happenstance that this was the kickoff session, as documenting processes has returned to prominence as the favored method to get IT and the business working together to create a more efficient and profitable operation.

Burrows told the audience that creating process documentation proved to be of great benefit because it:
• Provided IT leaders with an understanding of the business so they could recommend best uses of technology.

• Created an open discussion forum for business and IT.

• Identified best areas for IT investment to improve business innovation, operations and profit — not just maintenance of existing applications.

• Provided knowledge of the total enterprise, thereby enabling creation of the optimum IT infrastructure.

The presentation (available at www.nrf.com/artsusersmeeting) concluded with the unveiling of ARTS’ high-level draft retail business model, which included the following principal functions that will be detailed to permit process improvement analysis and automation:
• Customer relationship management
• Merchandising
• Shopping
• Store/channel operations
• Inventory and distribution
• Finance and administration

ARTS is engaged in a major project to create a Retail Process Model documenting all of the processes retailers perform to operate a successful business. The plan is to break the functions down into detailed business processes that can be encoded as SOA services, linked together as applications and operated in the cloud. The end game is that ARTS will provide members with a complete roadmap for operating a fully automated and successful retail enterprise via a business process model linked to the data model and a library of SOA services supported with whitepapers and educational materials.

As part of this project ARTS has developed a whitepaper, “Why Business Process Modeling? A Practical Call to Action in Support of Process Modeling,” that can serve as a basic primer on what, why and how. This 39-page document is a must-read for anyone considering engaging in process modeling — and if you have not considered modeling, read it and you will. The whitepaper is available to ARTS members, free of charge, at www.nrf-arts.org.

Process modeling is not a new technique — it was used extensively in the ’80s and ’90s, when companies developed software applications in house — and based on personal experience I can emphatically state, “It works.”

In 1981, my IT hero James Martin, along with Clive Finkelstein, wrote Information Engineering, describing how to conduct process modeling to refine work methods and create single-version-of-the-truth databases. We used it to create a strategic information plan for Federated’s corporate office: With this success, I moved on to a major East Coast retailer and, in less than three years, transformed the business support from recording merchandise sales in black books with paper and pencil to a fully automated merchandise processing system. Since there was no SOA at the time, we labeled paragraphs in the COBOL programs to correspond with the process number within the business model. We developed all applications; the only purchased software was the database management system.

Because the core retail business processes are largely the same across companies, the business model developed for the retailer referenced above was quickly updated to serve as the foundation for the strategic data plan of another retailer. Yes, there are differences, but the business model enables one to quickly change the processes before they are embedded in program code.

ARTS is committed to developing a retail business model: You can develop your own, purchase one at great cost or join the ARTS team. History repeatedly proves that collaborative efforts produce better results in less time, so I encourage you to consider joining ours. Contact us at arts@nrf.com.