Relation between process and service logics

Abstract

It is generally accepted that the process control of a small and medium-sized manufacturing business enterprise is the foundation of high quality care of firm’s business processes. Any business process is seen as an indivisible sequence of activity steps designed to perform complex business activities. In its statutory documents the company should have concise descriptions of at least the main processes, along with their contexts in a given department of the company and the employee position.The main business processes, of course many others, are not immutable, on the contrary, they are very often changing. Many processes occur, others are modified others disappear as antiquated and useless to support strategic business objectives. All this is a consequence of the firms’ effort needed to maintain competitiveness in the harsh and dynamic consumer market.Business processes are not isolated, many of them are part of a relatively large process chains, so-called enterprise services, see (Erl, 2005). The discipline of Software Engineering responded to the possibility of consolidating enterprise functionality with enterprise services with the method SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) leading to new applications for enterprise information systems.In contrast to business processes, business services are still not sufficiently recognized in the statutory documents of enterprises. Informaticians, producing software applications for enterprise information systems, must draw on company management knowledge relating to the general context and processes together with management to prepare business services. There are therefore more relevant questions based on the emergence of corporate services and information modeling in the discipline of Information Engineering. Acceptable responses are not included in a lot of publications or in publications of the doyen of SOA Thomas Erl, see (Erl, 2006) and thus the proposed SOA paradigm suffers from the same problem.The present article tries to give an answer to those questions and show the relevant theoretical basis for finding service solutions of business process logic. Furthermore, this article wants to show possible conversions of known methods of process analysis of Information Engineering disciplines, such as the method Eriksson – Penker Business Extensions, or the method ARIS by prof. Scheer, into the platform of enterprise services.

Keywords

• process logic
• process threads
• enterprise services
• service logic
• SOA (Service oriented Architecture)
• process diagram