This tutorial explains how to design and build a business process for a common
activity: managing expenses. To design a business process, you must understand the
business objective that the process achieves, and the elements (such as people and
data) that the process requires.
Managing Expenses
Expense procedures are simple in principle but involve tradeoffs. A rigid expense
reporting system pleases accountants but can slow operations. On the other hand, a
company with relaxed expense rules may spend too much, or even lose track of
expenditures.
This tutorial shows how a simple process is designed and implemented. Starting simple is
convenient not only for the purposes of a tutorial; it is also a useful design
approach. You can easily add more capability later on, and further refine the
process as you obtain feedback from users. One of the main advantages of using an
executable process model is that successive design-test-use iterations can be done
quickly.
Typical Expense Report Sequence
The following sequence of steps roughly describes how an expense report is handled. Pay
attention not only to
what is done but
who does it, and also note the
sequence of events:
- An employee purchases a product or service he requires. For instance, a sales person on a
trip rents a car.
- The employee submits an expense report with a list of items, along with the receipts for
each item.
- A supervisor reviews the expense report and approves or rejects the report. Since the
company has expense rules, there are circumstances where the supervisor can accept
or reject the report upon first inspection. These rules could be automated, to
reduce the workload on the supervisor.
- If the supervisor rejects the report, the employee who submitted it is given a chance to
edit it, for example to correct errors or better describe an expense. If the
supervisor approves the report, it goes to the treasurer.
- The treasurer checks that all the receipts have been submitted and match the items on the
list. If all is in order, the treasurer accepts the expenses for
processing--including, for example, payment or refund, and accounting. If receipts
are missing or do not match the report, he sends it back to the employee.
- If a report returns to the employee for corrections, it must again go to a supervisor,
even if the supervisor previously approved the report.
- If the treasurer accepts the expenses for processing, the report moves to an automatic
activity that links to a payment system. The process waits for the payment
confirmation.
- After the payment is confirmed, the process ends.
In the following sections, we describe an Oracle BPM process that implements the above
steps and adds some additional features.