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Business Models
Change is a constant in business - change in market opportunities, change in source materials, change in customer audience, change in environment - all leading to change in business processes. Re-engineering business processes is a strategic part of any business. The basic requirement that enterprise-class business process engineering principles are hard wired into operations is applied across the spectrum of different business sectors. In fulfilling this fundamental governance requirement, Enterprise Architect and a number of standards, including the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), are essential tools.
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).
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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 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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BPMN Support |
Enterprise Architect has very detailed and comprehensive support for the Business Process Model and 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. |
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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 and so on, can be captured and reported from a suitable BPSim engine. Sparx Systems provide a BPSim-capable simulator (for separate purchase) - the MDG BPSim Execution Engine - which integrates with the BPSim and BPMN models defined in Enterprise Architect, providing the capability to run and store the results from multiple simulations and to perform convenient comparisons across each configuration's result set. Installing the Sparx Systems MDG BPSim Execution Engine and registering the licence for it are pre-requisites for accessing and using the built-in BPSim configuration facilities. |
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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. |
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Business Modeling Notation |
Stereotypes and modeling conventions from the UML business modeling extensions defined in earlier versions of the UML. |
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Eriksson-Penker Notation |
Support for the Business Process Model and Notation, defined by Eriksson and Penker. A useful and straightforward process mapping that quickly builds maps of processes, inputs, outputs and goals that constitute a business or enterprise level process. |
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Case Management Model & Notation (CMMN) |
The MDG Technology for the Case Management Model & Notation helps you to create CMMN models with Enterprise Architect, for representing actions taken regarding a subject in a particular situation to achieve a desired outcome. |
Learn more
- Comparison of Editions (Online Resource)