Messages

1

General Board / Re: Data objetc reuse in BPMN?

« on: July 13, 2017, 05:59:46 am »

Hello Richard,

Thank you for your reply! In other words, you would suggest not using BPMN at all? Unfortunately I am afraid that I do not have that option. Guidelines and compatibility requirements from the mother company require me to use BPMN this time. However, I must confess that data modeling is not in the core of modeling in this case. I would be perfectly satisfied, if I could:

a) Define three states for every document produced in a project (e.g. draft, final, reviewed)
b) Avoid entering all attributes for all data objects completely manually
c) Re-use data objects in different stages of the process (here we talk about quite limited amount of process phases, as we are a project organisation and follow traditional Systems Engineering V Model principles in our processes. So I might even do it manually should it otherwise be too time-consuming.)

So I believe that although BPMN may not be optimal, I might still use it (if not proved very unpractical).

You said:

What I'm saying is, BPMN can be tweaked to do what you want to do

Could you please give some idea what kind of tweaking you are in practice talking about? Maybe I would try that if it would be at least somehow feasible?

Cheers,

Aleksi

2

General Board / Data objetc reuse in BPMN?

« on: July 10, 2017, 05:49:57 pm »

Hi all,

I am pretty new EA user (Master some basics, but nothing advanced yet and still lot of things to learn). Currently I am using it mostly for business process modeling/ BPMN. I started with EA12 but I just updated it to EA13.

My goal is to model our engineering and other business processes and currently I am working on the use of particular data or different versions of it in different business processes across the company. I have tried to make sense of re-using data objects by watching the webinars of Frank Truyen and searching from this forum and the internet. And I basically understand that by using data objects and dataObjectReference I should be able to refer to a certain data and re-use it in my processes.

But I still have difficulties in actually using this concept in my models. I have already done the following:
- Created a model library (for the needed data I created a package called "Data Objects")
- Created a structure for my business processes (process chart, processes and sub-processes)
- Defined the first draft of process activities and data objects used or produced in the processes

Now in my business model I try to re-use a certain dataObject (call it "Contract A"). I make sure it refers to the dataObject "Contract" in the model library (by using dataObjectRef). I would have expected that I would now be able to centrally control the changes to "Contract A" but nothing seems to happen. For me it looks more like manual copy & paste style of work instead of fancy modeling.

So my questions are:
1. How should I use the dataObjects and dataObjectReferences in order use them in a meaningful and useful way?
2. How can I actually define different states for a data object in a process? (As I should be able to do according to the BPMN spec, if've understood it right)

So could you please help me out with this? This might be a really basic rookie mistake, so maybe the answer is quite easy too.

With many thanks,

Aleksi