Business Models

Enterprise Architect includes a wide range of modeling tools, diagram types, Patterns, Technologies and capabilities to support modeling a wide range of business focused and analytic domains. From strategic models that support capturing information and goals pertaining to the overall functioning of a large enterprise to simple mind maps, process modeling, requirements management, BPMN models and more, Enterprise Architect is the ideal platform for building and sharing business based models that can tightly integrate into an overall enterprise or system level architecture.

In addition to the extensive range of template driven reports available, Enterprise Architect also includes comprehensive support for building management level charts and dashboards that integrate tightly with model content. Series charts, pie graphs, heat maps and others make it possible to build a high level summary of the state of the current model (and of other models using custom connections).

Business Engineering

This collection of images shows some of the Business Engineering capabilities.

Business Modeling Overview

This table identifies some of the material to be discussed in the Business Engineering section. Note that many of the capabilities listed here are equally applicable to Systems, Software and Enterprise level modeling and design.

Please note that some features are edition dependent - please consult the Sparx Systems web site for details about which edition supports which features.

Feature	Description
Strategic Models	A range of strategy based model types including Strategy Maps, Value Chain, Balanced Scorecard, Dataflow and Org Chart. Essential modeling for management and for expressing overall business or enterprise level goals and strategy.
Charts and Dashboards	Material supporting the building of dashboards and specification of charts based on model content. Charts provide a real-time view into the health and status of a model and allow for hot spots and problem areas to be detected early and dealt with accordingly. A number of chart types are available, including Pie, Series, Bar and Heat Map.
Analysis Models	This section identifies a number of analytic diagram types that have an affinity for business engineering and analysis. Mind Mapping, Process diagrams and custom stereotypes targeting business scenarios and terms are some of the features discussed.
Requirements	Coverage of managing requirements in Enterprise Architect for the business user. A shortened version of the book length "Requirements Engineering" topic also available from Sparx Systems. Covers creating, tracing, managing and generally dealing with all kinds of requirements.
Decision Models	Information about building Decision tables as per the OMG decision modeling notation. Shows how to build a Decision table and how to display that table on a diagram.
Business Rules	An advanced mechanism for creating and working with Business Rules in a manner similar to the Decision Tables specified earlier but with some additional functionality that allows for the translation of those rules into activity charts and into code.
BPMN Support	Enterprise Architect has very detailed and comprehensive support for the Business Process Modeling Notation specification. BPMN is a popular business and process modeling notation that targets unambiguously defining business (and other) processes in a visual manner with downstream capabilities for simulation, model exchange and code generation.
BPSim Support	BPSim provides the business modeler with a mechanism for defining additional characteristics and parameters for a BPMN model that allow the BPMN model to be simulated with different "real world" scenarios. Performance data such as time, efficiency, throughput, resources used, resources idle & etc. can be captured and reported from a suitable BPSim engine. Sparx Systems plan to make a BPSim engine available as a plugin in the near future.
BPEL	Support for modeling and working with the BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) a subset of BPMN that supports export in the BPEL execution language format.
Business Modeling Notaion	Stereotypes and modeling conventions from the UML business modeling extensions defined in early version of the UML.
Eriksson-Penkar Notation	Support for the business process modeling notation defined by Eriksson and Penkar. A useful and straightforward process mappin gthat quickly builds maps of processes, inputs, outputs and goals that constitute a business or enterprise level process.