Inserting additional process levels

While modeling business processes, Open ModelSphere allows you to make top-down design, bottom-up design, or a mixture of the two!

Top-down Design:

This is the natural and most-used way to design business processes: the main processes are created first, and then each main process is decomposed in subprocesses, decomposed in turn in deeper subprocesses.

The simplest way to perform top-down design is to create the main processes (numbered 1, 2 and 3), then use the target tool to decompose a main process into a sub process diagram.  The decomposed process is denoted with a star (*).
 

Just before the decomposition:

Right after the decomposition:

Processes created under the decomposed process will be numbered 1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and so on.

Another equivalent way the to create subprocesses under a given process is to select the main process node in the explorer, right-click the node to get the pop-up menu and select the Add->Process operation.  This will create a process numbered 1.1 under the process 1.


Bottom-up Design:

Bottom-up design can be appropriate when you want to begin modeling with well-defined modular subprocesses that are to be aggregated for a modified workflow. 

Select a node corresponding to the Process 1 in the explorer, right-click the node to get the pop-up menu and select the Add->Super Process operation.  The current Process 1 will be renumbered 1.1, and a new superprocess 1 will be created above the selected process.
 

Mixing top-down and bottom-up designs:

The following chart describes the resulting process model after adding a process to the Engineering process, after adding a superprocess to the Engineering process, and after adding a superprocess to the top-level Development process.
 

Original process model.
 

Original process model after adding a process to Engineering.  Process 1.1 is created and placed under Engineering.
Original process model after adding a superprocess to Engineering.  A new process called SuperEngineering is created and takes the previous position of Engineering. Engineering is pulled at a deeper level.
Original process model after adding a superprocess to Development.  A new process called SuperDevelopment is created and placed over Development.  All the other processes are pulled at a deeper level.