Documenting the Process Chain with a Spreadsheet

What This Article Covers

• What is the state of process chain documentation.
• A method for dealing with this lack of documentation.

Background

Process chains are functionality in APO which allows of the scheduling of different events. While process chains can be very handy, one issue is that they have a tendency to be undocumented. Therefore, on many projects only the configuration resources actually know what is in the process chains. Process chains contain the following important pieces of information:

1. The number of steps in the process chain
2. The sequence of the steps (first A, then B, etc..)
3. The steps that are run in parallel (multiple steps can be kicked off at the same time, or even slightly lagged)
4. The variants for which the step applies

However, the process chain interface is not very good. The information is obtainable, but it’s not something that you generally want to keep going back to. Also, the process chain interface is inferior to a spreadsheet representation of the process chain. Spreadsheets are also easier to present from and to distribute to other project team members.

Therefore, what I recommend is extracting all of the information from the process chain and placing it into a spreadsheet. There will often be multiple runs at a company and multiple process chains. The best way to manage this is to simply place each process chain side by side in the spreadsheet, and this can allow all the stakeholders to see the relationships between the different process chains. Information from the variants, such as which product locations, and what time horizons apply to each process chain can be added as desired within any of the spreadsheet cells. If this is done, you can expect a better understanding of the process chains and the steps that drive the solution among the project team members.

Conclusion

Process chains can be effectively documented in a spreadsheet. However, I generally do not see this done, and only recently started doing it myself. However, once it is done, it makes the process chains much more understandable. It is useful both for IT as well as for the business.

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