Many surveys regarding tools used for process management and modeling show that Microsoft® Visio® is most frequently employed for this task; along with (amazingly) Excel® and PowerPoint® for business process documentation. The quality of such deliverables and their value for the company/organization differs by the functionality and modeling capabilities of the respective tool (and do not forget about the people’s experience and skills). The interesting question is: How to close the gap between the easy-to-use Office tools (so much loved by business folks and consultants) and those complex and costly tools preferred by architects?

The  American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) defines and manages process classification frameworks (PCF) for specific industries as well as cross industry.  The PCF allows for the efficient definition of processes, the benchmarking of performance and the structuring of knowledge and content. There is a remarkable number of organizations trying to benefit from the APQC PCF which are also huge SAP shops.  Surprisingly it does not seem evident how the APQC best practices can meet the SAP SLA requirements to document core business processes with the SAP® Solution Manager tool.

Business analysts often spend a lot of time and efforts when it comes to creating a nice decomposition of an organization´s business architecture. Typically the architecture design is driven by organizational or business area requirements. Depending on the frameworks used such as SCOR®, APQC® or DODAF and NAF the process levels describing the implementation of IT systems  may yield to a quite complex architectural construct of nested diagrams and viewpoints. This really challenges QA teams to prepare test-cases for integration and regression tests in the context of user-acceptance testing (UAT) of end-to-end process flows. Here the reverse decomposition technique facilitates the design of perfect test-cases for manual and automated test execution.