Industries

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.

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.

Representing an online claim filing process, this nested drawing has been laid out using left-to-right oriented hierarchical layout employing orthogonal edge routing.

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.

Case Studies

• See our Quantitative Decision Support Case Study.
• See our TIBCO Case Study.