Overview

Scenario

The shipping department for a fictitious company named Impact does business with three shipping companies: Standard Domestic Shipping, Ship Big, and Worldwide Shipping. Standard Domestic Shipping offers the best price for small domestic deliveries, Ship Big is used for large domestic deliveries, and Worldwide Shipping is used for all non-domestic deliveries. The following screen capture shows the current process for choosing a shipping company and obtaining a quote.

1. The process receives the "Shipping Info."

2. The process determines if the "Shipping Info" is for a domestic delivery.

a. If "Yes", the process routes (based on the shipping cost) the "Shipping Info" to either the Ship Big or Standard Shipping company for a "Shipping Quote".

b. If "No", then the "Shipping Info" is passed to the "Worldwide Shipping" company for a "Shipping Quote".

3. The process returns the "Shipping Quote".

As the business analyst looking at the Impact shipping department process, you realize that if you remove the decision-making details, the process can be thought of as having two main tasks: getting a shipping quote from a provider and returning it to the caller.

Although this process looks easy, there are a couple more details of the process that you must consider as a business analyst.

• Although Standard Domestic Shipping provides a much better rate than any other company for small domestic deliveries, their definition of "small" keeps changing. This month, they might give the best rates for packages valued at less than $2000, and next month they might increase that limit to $3000 or $5000. Therefore, the values cannot be hard-coded into the process application.
• Rumors are surfacing about a new international shipping company that provides better shipping rates for large international deliveries. Therefore, the shipping department process has to be flexible enough to allow for the addition of a new shipping company.

Your role as the business analyst is to define a business process that meets the following requirements:

• Decouples the process from the decision logic that is susceptible to change
• Has the flexibility to change the definitions for a shipping company
• Has the flexibility to add a new shipping company

After you define the business process, your IT department will finish the implementation and deploy the solution. You can then test your process using the Business Space interface by changing the definition for Standard Domestic Shipping and adding a new international shipping company.

Process data

The following diagram shows two items representing the data that flows through the process: Shipping Info and Shipping Quote.

Each of these business items contains multiple pieces of data.

Shipping Info is based on a standard form that is used within the shipping department as shown in the following example.

Shipping Quote is the data that is returned from the process. It has two data items: the Order Number and the cost of shipping.