Examples of Composite Business Processes

Composite processes integrate various stand-alone "process islands" allowing firms to quickly share and act on changes on demand. Some examples of composite business processes follow.

Target-to-Engage spans planning, creating, executing, and measuring marketing activities.

Engage-to-Close starts with managing sales opportunities and follows the process through to negotiation and closing.

Install-to-Maintain involves capturing, resolving, managing, and improving service for installed products.

Request-to-Resolve covers responding to help requests, resolving problems, tracking resolutions and escalations, and enhancing service agreements.

Source-to-Settle involves designing products, engaging suppliers for sourcing and procurement, and settling and analyzing the process.

Design-to-Deploy covers designing, sourcing, evaluating and deploying manufacturing.

Plan-to-Produce spans planning, deploying, producing, and assessing production.

Order-to-Support involves order entry, management, fulfilling and settling goods sold, and providing after-sales support.

Plan-to-Act includes forecasting and planning to create operational business plans and budgets.

Record-to-Measure covers recording, consolidating, and reporting financial transactions.

Cash-to-Invest spans managing and positioning cash, executing deals, and managing risk.

Propose-to-Complete involves planning, prioritizing, and managing resources and projects.

Attract-to-Onboard begins with recruiting and ends with hiring and workforce enablement.

Assess-to-Develop centers on workforce deployment, including training, evaluating, and assessing employees.

Track-to-Deploy includes tracking workforce schedules, time, payment, and deployment.

Plan-to-Reward involves managing workforce compensation, incentives, and benefits.

New integration standards are making composite processes feasible. Early attempts to create composite applications utilized a variety of competing software integration technologies and the need to custom-build point-to-point linkages among applications - often a time-consuming and costly proposition. However, over the past few years, the software industry is beginning to adopt standards for data description and communication over the Internet. These standards - along with the Internet deployment of standards-based applications published as "components" in a multi-application solution - are known as Web Services. These standards promise to simplify and speed up the wiring together of multiple applications, paving the way for composite processes.