In this third and final post about Principles of a Process Oriented Customer Order Tracking System I will talk about an essential part of the paper, why processes. The author states:

The different looks upon the life-cycle of a customer order are solved in the current systems with statuses and dates. This looks simple, but it has just the opposite effect. Except maybe for some insiders, the bunch of status and date acronyms looks confusing and difficult.

Clearly the author means: “I don’t understand the current way of working, let’s create a new way that nobody understands, but me.” And so we come to this magic of process-orientation where all statuses and date acronyms are suddenly spread over a process tree instead of being shown in a list.

In part (2) I promised you the ultimate sentence containing the whole 17 page text. Here it is:

“A PPOCOTS is a dream converted into a system to track objects on orders in a generic way by means of simple tree-linked processes, which have a planned and an actual time line (by means of start and end); that may or may not be interrupted or changed (by means of corrections on the planned start and end times and process durations); and that may be added to the tree in an ad-hoc manner (to show unforseeable events and interruptions), but are always (in a whole) showing an accurate view on the current situation of the object on order”

In other words: a system to track customer orders, exactly as the title says.

Note: please note that I am now working in the CO-Pilot (the real system behind PPOCOTS) since 1999 and that there hasn’t been dull moment since. We are currently rewriting the old COBOL/VB app to Java and rolling out all over the world. I still love it.