Modular Process Design Principles And Their Analysis In A Service-oriented Applications In The Design

With the rapid development of technology and globalization wave, business environment becomes more and more turbulent. Firms should pay more attention to business process flexibility besides efficiency. Firms with flexible business process can grasp opportunity brought by environment change and exceed their competitors easily.Literatures in strategy management, organization design and business process outsourcing point out that modular design of business process have properties of "capsulation" and "plug and play", enabling business processes to be quickly reorganized(detach, modify, linking, etc.), which is a important way to improve business flexibility with little loss of efficiency and function. At the same time, service-oriented architecture (SOA) becomes mature enough to be information infrastructure to support implementation of modular business process. However to make modular process design create value in practice, problems of how to measure, model and design modular business process need to be solved.Modular design of business processes requires end-to-end business processes be divided into loosely coupled, standardization and autonomy group of activities. We proposed influence factors model for implementation of modular process based on modular system theory and transaction cost economics. This factor model gives a solid theoretical foundation for other parts of this paper.A measurement system of business process modularity degree was proposed based on system flexibility research. This system includes two measure units: process configurability and process loosely-coupled degree. Process configurability means the service type's scope provide by reorganization of process module. Loosely-coupled degree described how low the dependency relationship among process modules is. Loosely-coupled degree enable process module re-configure quickly without incurring high coordinating cost. To describe these two units, a "Service elements-Activity-Dependency structure Matrix (SeAD Matrix)" was designed to modeling business process based on quality function deployment (QFD) and design structure matrix (DSM). SeAD Matrix can model business service elements and dependency relationship.The granularity of business process module plays an important role in modular process design. We analyzed business process granularity's influence on process modularity degree. Results show that with the increasment of process module granularity, the process modularity degree will first increase and then after reach a certain degree it will decrease. For processes which have various customer requirements and turbulent environment, fine-grained granularity is a better choice, otherwise coarse-grained granularity is better. A business process module design algorithm was proposed based on SeAD matrix and granularity principle.Since SOA and modular business process has similar theory base, we apply modular business process design principle to service oriented analysis and design. We proposed strategy analysis model for deployment of SOA, and method of business service identification and design. We also developed an assistant tool called SeAD-Tools for service-oriented analysis and design. Finally, we use "iron-automobile" supply chain process to show the application of this method.