Examples
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Examples

Example 1: Order Fulfillment

The scenario here is of a small company which sells beach balls. They have a process for servicing an order.

Actors

  • Sales (person)

  • Billing (program)

  • Warehouse (person)

  • Marketing (program)

The process

  1. The sales person receives an order and enters it into the system.

    1. This includes the type number of products ordered and the payment information.

  2. Once this is complete, the order will go to both billing and the warehouse.

  3. While the warehouse people package and ship the order, the billing system will perform whatever credit card transactions are necessary.

  4. Once the product is both shipped and billed, a marketing system will determine what promotional material and/or special offers to send to the customer, in order to elicit future business.

Graphically, the process could be represented as follows:

Example 2: Document conversion

This scenario concerns a news aggregation company called NewsCO which takes in news from various sources and republishes it in a variety of formats. Here we will look at a simplified workflow which handles two input formats.

Actors

  • RSS -> NewsCO XML format Converter (program)

  • Plain text -> NewsCO XML format converter (program)

  • Editor (person)

  • NewsCO XML web publisher (program)

  • NewsCO XML Analyzer (program)

  • NewsCO XML RSS publisher (program)

The process

  1. The process begins when an article arrives, either from an RSS feed or via a file drop in plain text format.

  2. Conversion:

    1. If the article is in RSS format, the RSS XML will be converted to a proprietary XML format (the NewsCO XML format)

    2. If the article is in plain text, it will be parsed and converted to the NewsCO XML format.

    3. If there is an error in the conversion process, the article will be handed to a human editor who will manually do the conversion

  3. Publishing

    1. The NewCO XML will be converted to a webpage and posted on a web site for consumption by the public. The web publisher is an asynchronous program which accepts XML and later provides notification when the publishing is complete. This could be a separate workflow.

    2. NewsCO customers receive RSS feeds of articles based on keywords. The article will be scanned for keywords. A database entry will be created.

    3. Each customer who has expressed interest in a keyword found in the article will have their RSS feed updated with a link to the published web article.

Graphically, the process could be represented as follows:

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