The Elementary Business Process represents the most elemental level business process in an organization.

The Elementary Business Process is modeled in a number of different diagrams:

Much information is captured about an elementary business process. In general, you try to measure the performance of your processes in terms efficiency, time (Cycle Times), cost (Activity Based Costing, Cost Breakdowns, Unit Costs, Quality Costs), and how they compare to ideal processes (Best Practice Summary). You also aim to get a handle on what the processes do (relationship to functions), who performs them (relationship to Organizational Units and Roles through swimlanes and cross-reference matrices), the technology used to implement them, and where they are implemented (location).

In the Related Definitions tab of an elementary business process definition, you can view what other definitions have been established as related to the elementary business process. For example, you could view what data (entities) the business process works on (creates, reads, updates, or deletes, say), what applications it is used by, and where (location) the business process is performed.

All related definition listings are read-only; they can only be entered through the applicable matrices of the Matrix Editor. The Related Definitions properties of an EBP are:

You can define a Best Practice definition.

Performance measures enable you to measure your business process against best practices performed by benchmark companies in your field or other fields.

For each performance measurement of your business, you can define your own performance, and list Benchmark Companies you want to compare yourself to.

Benchmark Performance

Performance Gap

Process Enablers

Process Performance is used to analyze the performance and value of the elementary business processes in your organization. Value is generally a function of time, cost, quality, and quantity. The primary focus is to identify opportunities for improvement and leverage points where the greatest impact can be achieved.

Process Performance information is modeled for the Elementary Business Processes contained within Process Chart (or alternatively, Process Map) diagrams. Process Performance Summary these tabs in the Elementary Business Processes definition:

You can run a Process Performance Summary report to output much of the information established in this section. The report is provided as part of System Architect’s Word Reporting system. Select Reports, Word Reports, Business Enterprise Reports, and in the Business Enterprise Report Generator dialog in Microsoft Word, select the Business Process tab, and select Business Process Performance.

Within the Performance Summary tab, you enter information concerning the Process Thread that the Elementary Business Process is contained in.

Event/Key Input: Select the key Events in Process Charts that causes the EBP’s Process Thread to be performed.

Result/Key Output: List the key results of the Process Thread. Every Process Thread has one primary result and zero or more secondary results.

Volume: Volume is described in terms of the input events and output results listed above. You list the Average Volume and the Peak Volume of the Input Events and the Output Results. A text field is provided for both Volume properties – you can type in any measurement unit (in other words, 10/hr, 50/day, 200/week, 5000/month, and so on).

As part of the elementary business processes in your models, you establish actual processing time and cycle time for each.

Enter the Minimum, Average, and Maximum, and processing time for the elementary business process. System Architect provides a text field to hold this information, so that you can type in the unit of measure – for example, the elementary business process Enter Order might have a Minimum Process Time of 2 hrs, a Maximum Process Time of 4 hrs, and an Average Process Time of 3 hrs.

Cycle time is the elapsed time per transaction, or event. Enter the Minimum, Average, and Maximum,time to cycle through the process – this includes actual processing time (see above) and additional time consumed by movement and waiting. System Architect provides a text field to hold this information, so that you can type in the unit of measure – for example, the elementary business process Enter Order might have a Minimum Cycle Time of 2 hrs, a Maximum Cycle Time of 8 hrs, and an Average Cycle Time of 6 hrs.

The default Processing Time is specified as integers. You can customize the USRPROPS.TXT file to change the Minimum, Average, and Maximum fields to contain decimal numbers. You do this by changing the field type from numeric to text, as illustrated in the example below:

You can find more information in the Extensibility Guide, which is available on the UNICOM Systems, Inc. website.

You can break down the cost of each elementary business process into meaningful categories, such as Transaction Costs and Capital Costs.

A typical cost breakdown workproduct is to compute the total cost per elementary business process by adding all of its Transaction and Capital Costs. You can then compute total costs for the Process Thread that is composed of a group of elementary business processes (and also compute costs for the Process Thread by breakdown – labor, materials, and capital).

The default unit of measure for the costs is dollars ($). A text field is provided so that you can type in any measurement unit (that is, 1000 lira, and so on). You can also alter the default symbol ($) through USRPROPS.TXT.

Specify the cost of the labor consumed directly in the elementary business process.

Specify the cost of the materials and services consumed directly in the elementary business process.

Specify the cost of the facilities and equipment used directly in the elementary business process.

As part of the elementary business processes in your models, you establish costs for each event that causes the elementary business process to be performed – in other words, the total cost of an elementary business process, divided by the Process Performance Summary, gives you the unit cost.

Input: the total cost of an elementary business process (see Cost Breakdown), divided by the Process Performance Summary, gives you the unit cost.

Output: the total cost of an elementary business process divided by the Process Performance Summary, gives you the unit cost.

Estimated Cost per Month: the total cost of an elementary business process (see Cost Breakdown), divided by the Process Performance Summary, gives you the estimated costs per unit per month.

Estimated Cost per Order: the total cost of an elementary business process (see Cost Breakdown), divided by the number of orders, gives you the estimated costs per order.

Often times the cost of an event is more dependent on a cost driver within the event than the event itself. For example, the time it takes fill an order might depend on the number of line items in the order. Or, the cost of a print job might depend on number of production runs. In these cases, line items and production runs are cost drivers. It is more effective to compute costs per cost driver, rather than unit.

In the cost driver text field, enter the name of the cost driver or cost drivers.

Enter the estimated number of cost driver units incurred per month.

The total cost of an elementary business process (see Cost Breakdown), divided by the cost driver estimated units (see property above).

As part of the Process Performance Summary of the elementary business processes in your models, you establish costs for adding quality to your products and services.

The default unit of measure for the costs is dollars ($). A text field is provided so that you can type in any measurement unit (that is, 1000 lira, and so on). You can also alter the default symbol ($) through USRPROPS.TXT.

Quality Costs include:

In addition, there are Operations costs associated with the quality costs. The sum of all quality costs plus the operation cost adds up to the total production costs for an elementary business process.

Quality Statistics include:

Performance Measurement is a system for monitoring, managing, and improving the business processes of the organization.

The Performance Measurement properties of an elementary business process are as described below:

Within this text field you can enter a description of the characteristics of your measurement system. A good measurement system can include the following properties:

Cycle time is the elapsed time per transaction, or event. This includes actual processing time (see above) and additional time consumed by movement and waiting. Enter the time to cycle through the process, by percentile. There are three percentiles – 50 percentile (median), 80 percentile, and 100 percentile (maximum). System Architect provides a text field to hold this information, so that you can type in the unit of measure – for example, the elementary business process Enter Order might have a Median Percentile of 5 hrs, an 80 Percentile of 8 hrs, and a Maximum Percentile of 1 hr.

Enter the target average cost of the elementary business process per event. For example, if the event is an Order, enter the cost of each business process per Order. The default unit of measure for the costs is dollars ($). A text field is provided so that you can type in any measurement unit (that is, 1000 lira, and so on). You can also alter the default symbol ($) in the USRPROPS.TXT file.

Enter the target minimum error rate – the percentage of cases processed incorrectly per elementary business process.

Cycle Time Measures:- Elapsed time per transaction.

Cost Measures: Resource input per transaction.

Quality Measures: Correct outputs as a percentage of the total, expressed in a number of formats including minimum, average, maximum, range, and percentiles.

The list of functions that an elementary business process performs is listed within the EBP's Function Detail tab.

Lists the functions that the elementary business process performs. This list is read-only – functions are added to the list through the matrix editor (View > Matrix Browser; click the Business Enterprise tab, Elem Bus Process to Function).

Lists the Process Threads that the elementary business process is involved in. This list is read-only: Process Threads are added to the list through the matrix editor (select View > Matrix Browser, select the Business Enterprise tab, and double-click the Elem Bus Process to Process Thread matrix). The matrix editor is itself updated by process threads that get information from Process Chart and Process Decomposition diagrams (see Process Threads in Process Chart modeling).