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Overview and Challenges |  | | Entire industries have developed in response to the myriad problems associated
with implementing best business practices. There are two primary categories
within this industry: business process and logistics.
- Business process focuses on the static structure of an organization
including established organizational structure; established policies
and processes; and the reengineering of these policies and processes.
Applications include customer relationship management systems for marketing
program management and sales force automation.
- The logistics and operations research fields have grown around the
execution or dynamic side of a complex business. Applications in this
area are built around workflow, supply chain management and enterprise
resource planning. Applications include operational support systems
and e-commerce infrastructure systems.
Both the business process and logistics categories utilize databases
to support their applications, building process and workflow models on
top of them to model their customers' businesses. There is also some analyst
categorization of businesses supporting these markets as the 'front office'
and 'back office' companies.
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Tom Sawyer Software Solutions | | |
Information Flow and Time Dependence
Information flow representation is critical within systems that
track and manage the flow of goods and services in and out of organizations,
such as in workflow, supply chain, scheduling, document management, e-commerce,
and resource allocation applications. For example, diagrams help manage
web-based procurement and order processing in e-commerce applications. Many
of these activities are also time-critical. All of these applications require
directed scalable graph layout in which line direction is used to represent
information flow and time dependence. Tom Sawyer products satisfy the numerous
requirements that naturally follow from directed graphs, such as graphs
with feedback cycles and incremental layout.
Organizational Relationships and Business Process Design
Suitably structured organizational relationships are central
to the successful functioning of any complex organization. The business
processes that organizations utilize to function properly have interdepartmental
responsibilities that evolve over time. Due to considerations associated
with decision points in process, automatic scalable visualization of process
models reduces the implementation costs associated with large-scale organizational
functions. All such enterprise applications can be improved dramatically
with Tom Sawyer's scalable layout and diagramming technology.
Business Process Modeling
The ability to graphically
define and document the internal processes within an organization
for re-engineering is critical for improving efficiency. Being
able to organize and visualize processes help organizations
define, document, test, control, execute, improve and integrate
their business processes.
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There are many aspects that require a diagrammatic interface.
Process modeling allows the user to visualize and document
business processes. Analysis and simulation provide
a built-in simulation engine to better understand changes
to process models. In addition, documentation and reporting features
often highlight process diagrams that clearly illustrate an
organization's internal workflow. This type of documentation
is particularly helpful to comply with standards such as ISO
9000.
Incremental layout
takes as input both an existing drawing and the user's changes
and produces a new drawing that preserves the original drawing's
structure as much as possible. Because the user's mental map
of the graph is preserved, the user's understanding of the information
is enhanced.
The hierarchical library
supports incremental layout and is well-suited to applications
in flow charting and decision support.
Resource Planning
Our products address the central diagramming and scalable
layout concerns of both the business process and logistics sectors. We solve
the primary information visualization problems for these industries by allowing
users to easily see time-dependent information flows.
Supply chain,
scheduling, and resource planning applications support optimized delivery
of goods and "just in time" part replenishment. These applications track
and manage the flow of goods and services in and out of organizations
for supply chain management, inventory, and product development dependencies.
For example, a common requirement is to display cost relationships in
supplier-consumer relationships.
In e-commerce
applications, diagrams help manage web-based procurement and
order processing. Information flow representation is also
widely used to show workflow and processes. These diagrams
make use of customized directed and undirected graph layout.
Edge direction enables a well-defined display of information
flow.
Many activities are time-critical. Large logistics application vendors
build applications with powerful resource planning and scheduling functions.
Diagrams produced with scalable layout are necessary for use within nearly
all applications for project management, resource allocation, cost accounting,
and industrial scheduling.
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