Business process modeler (BPM)
The Business process modeler (BPM) lets you create, view, and modify standard process flows inside finance and operations apps. BPM standardizes the process flows, documentation, and its usage throughout the implementation lifecycle.
To create a business process model in finance and operations apps, you must use the Task recorder tool and save the task guide in the Lifecycle Services.
The BPM tool includes public libraries, which you could create a copy of and use, or you can create a new one. You should use the existing business process libraries as a starting point and modify them according to your industry and organization needs.
Before connecting to a Lifecycle Services project, it is important to first ensure that a BPM library exists in Lifecycle Services. We recommend that you ensure a BPM library exists before selecting a Lifecycle Services project to connect to. Setting the display order of BPM libraries is the last step in connecting to Lifecycle Services.
You can view the three types of libraries in BPM, as follows:
- Global libraries - These are available from Microsoft and can be used as a starting point to build your own.
- Corporate libraries - These are libraries owned by your organization for any organization user to leverage.
- Project libraries - These are available to users within the Lifecycle Services project with appropriate access.
The BPM library is divided into three sections:
- Views - You can author and edit, review, and merge your hierarchies with the configuration and data manager tool.
- Process hierarchy - Here you can view/build your business process and requirements hierarchy.
- Process details - Here you maintain more information for a specific reference/line in the hierarchy and include details such as countries applicable, industry applicable, and so on. Identify the fit and gaps between user requirements and the default functionality in finance and operations apps.
Business processes
A business process is a collection of related, structural activities/requirements with interconnection among them, and which can be represented in a flowchart comprising decision points and dependencies.
Many organizations follow the industry-specific terminology of business processes:
- Record to report - This describes the process of managing financial and ledger information for any organization.
- Order to cash - This describes the process of receiving and processing customer sales and its entire lifecycle till their payment.
- Procure to pay - This describes the process of ordering and processing vendor invoices and its entire lifecycle till payment settlement.
- Plan to produce - This describes the process of creating and building products/services and its entire chain from demand to supply. Business processes are best described using flows and visuals and have several uses, such as training, testing, solution acceptance.
Each business process comprises one or many subprocesses in the functional domain. Sub-processes help in visualizing inter-dependencies within a business process and have links to other processes.
A requirement is a series of activities/steps within a subprocess. Every organization must keep a goal of collecting the requirements as structured as possible, as it smooths out the rest of the project activities, to ensure success.
By using the Task recorder, you can capture a business process and save it into a node of a BPM library in Lifecycle Services related to the project running the instance of finance and operations apps. This will automatically create the graphical representation of the business process.
When your business processes are complete, you can export a business process node as a Microsoft Word document and use it as a training manual in the later phases of the project.
Gap analysis sessions
During the gap analysis phase of implementation, you can use the BPM libraries and add your requirements associated with the customer’s business process. You can specify whether the requirement is out-of-box or a gap.
Microsoft AppSource is a convenient place to find the right third-party solution for a specific gap functionality. You can then use the BPM library to view all the processes and gaps to identify the areas that require any customization or integration of a third-party solution from an independent software vendor (ISV).
During the fit-gap analysis sessions, the consultant and the product experts should try to find workarounds for every possible gap. Use the BPM library to identify the common business processes and best practices.
There are many common features in finance and operations apps that are applicable to any module. These features, if carefully examined, can address many gaps. In this section, we will briefly cover some of these common features.
Microsoft Excel integration can be used as an option to fill the gaps related to data import/export and ad-hoc reporting done by business users. You can also use these features by building data entities for the custom features that you build as part of your solution.