Clips and Tacks is a fictional office supply company. In this business scenario, Clips and Tacks is processing orders for office supplies and shipping them to customers.
The following sequence of events describes the Clips and Tacks business process for handling incoming orders.
- The business process is initiated when a customer submits an order.
- A business rule evaluates the data from the order form and determines whether the order can be automatically approved or if it needs human approval. When the total purchase price of the order is $750.00 or less, the order is automatically approved. When the total purchase price of the order exceeds $750.00, it is sent to a person for review.
- For orders that are automatically approved, the customer account is checked to determine if it is in good standing. If the customer account is in good standing, the order is sent for shipment; otherwise, the order is sent to a person for review.
- If the order is approved by reviewer, then it is sent for shipment; otherwise, the order is canceled and a notification is sent to the customer.
- The orders that are ready for shipment are given a packaging slip number and are sent to the customer.
Clips and Tacks recently determined that it could save money by using external shipping carriers instead of shipping all orders directly. Initially, Clips and Tacks decided to use Better Shipping for large domestic orders (an order that is greater than $50), which charges a flat fee of $8 per order. For small or large international orders, Clips and Tacks decided to use International Express™, which charges a flat fee of $25. (Better Shipping and International Express are fictional shipping companies.) For small domestic orders, Clips and Tacks decided to continue shipping directly, which costs $10 per order.
- Change 1
- A few months after this new shipping structure was implemented, Clips and Tacks decided to outsource all domestic shipping to Better Shipping, even for small orders at the same flat fee of $8 per order.
- Change 2
- After another few months, Clips and Tacks was offered a great deal for shipping in and around North Carolina. LocalShippers charges a flat fee of $5 for small and large orders for customers located in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia. Clips and Tacks decided to change to the following shipping structure:
- LocalShippers for orders in and around North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia at a flat fee of $5 per order
- Better Shipping for all other domestic orders at a flat fee of $8 per order
- International Express for all international orders at a flat fee of $25 per order
Data model
There are two business objects (also known as business items) in this tutorial. A business object called Order stores the following information for the business process:
- Customer information
- Items ordered
- Automatic approval field, which the business rule uses
- Current® status of the order, which is modified as the order progresses through the process
- The packing slip number, which is used to ship the order
- The shipping charges, which are set after it is determined which shipping service is used
The Notification business object is used to send notification to a customer about a canceled order. It has two fields: a text field and an e-mail field. There are two ways to generate business objects:
- By importing the complete object from an XSD file
- By manually creating the object through the authoring tools
To create the Order business object you will use the authoring tools, and to create the Notification business object you will import
Order.xsd.
Human tasks
There are three human tasks in this business process:
- A human task for entering data into the order entry form. This human task starts the business process. It is not modeled in the process; it is the process-initiating action.
- A modeled human task that represents the employee activity of reviewing the order when the total purchase amount is more than $750.00 or when the customer account is not in good standing.
- A modeled human task that represents the employee activity of shipping the order to the customer.