Business processes

When designing a Business Impact Manager implementation, consider the company’s business processes. Try to answer the following questions:

• Which business processes exist?

• Which business processes depend on applications or network devices?

  A business process represents functions and operations that support the internal business activities of an enterprise. In the manufacturing sector, for example, business processes include order processing, production planning, accounting, fulfillment and so on. Each of these may depend on different applications in order to operate as well as on network devices to pass information among and between applications and processes.

  In a hypothetical situation, an order comes into a company and is processed. The processing involves entering the order into a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application and simultaneously sending it to accounting for approval and fulfillment for shipping. Underlying accounting is a financials application and underlying fulfillment is a logistics application. Fulfillment begins preparing the order for shipping but cannot release the order until it receives approval from accounting. After accounting approves the order, it notifies both fulfillment and ordering through a financials application that updates both the logistics and CRM applications. If a network device that supports the financials application exhibits problems, the fulfillment and CRM applications will not receive necessary updates, which has an impact on the business.

  Try to map these dependencies in preparation for creating business topologies and weighing the impacts of problems on these processes. In the hypothetical situation, updating the logistics application, after accounting approves the order, may be a higher priority than updating the CRM application.