Process Accounting

Tempest > Process Accounting

Process Accounting is an approach for business process-based supply chain management. A Process Accounting system starts with extensive built-in functionality:

• Balances, transfers, and exchanges of products, services, and monies
• Generation, presentation, and exchange of business documents (orders, invoices, statements, reports, etc.)
• Periodic, threshold, predictive, and event-driven action triggers
• Process-based follow-up, prompting, validation, and recording of all events
• Workflow automation with role-based routing and authorization
• Multiple price components per transaction to reflect discounts, premiums, surcharges, promotions, etc.
• Multiple parties per exchange to reflect 3rd party service providers, regulatory agencies, taxing authorities, etc.
• Historical tracking able to re-create any state, balance, or document from any point in time
• Causality analysis able to link sequences of actions to final results and vice versa
• Static views for tax reporting, dynamic views for real-world performance analysis
• Non-destructive error correction and multi-party discrepancy resolution
• Fine-grained reporting able to calculate gross margin for every specific product unit
• Universal process model allows definition of virtually any type of business process
• Universal account model represents events from any point of view
• Universal event model records past and scheduled events in a process context
• Universal item model supports conversion, substitution, and bundling
• Universal currency model supports configurable conversion and translation for each account

Process Accounting systems then allow you to specify detailed business processes that reflect the way you:

• Order products from and return products to suppliers
• Settle and reconcile supplier accounts
• Manufacture, assemble, and recycle products
• Manage product inventories
• Deliver products to and process returns from customers
• Invoice and reconcile customer accounts
• Manage internal finances

The basic idea is that everything you do is part of a business process, but nothing specific about business processes is hard-coded into the system. Setting up a Process Accounting system mostly involves defining your process models and configuring your cosmetic look-and-feel preferences. You get all the benefits of process-based convenience, control, reporting, and analysis, and you don't have to adapt your business to work the way your software does. You also avoid the huge time and investment required to customize and implement traditional SCM or ERP systems.

Over the last several years, as the Process Accounting approach has taken shape, portions have been developed and tested in the field. In 1997, an early proof-of-concept system named BookDis was developed to manage retail book distribution for the European Book Company in San Francisco. BookDis implemented roughly 30% of the Process Accounting approach and is still in active production use today. In 1999, a more powerful system named Trade was developed to handle wholesale periodical supply chain operations and account management. A true enterprise application prototype, Trade implemented roughly half the Process Accounting approach and successfully managed operations for two years until the business line was shut down in 2001.

Although a full implementation has never been built, the Process Accounting approach is based on well-established concepts and field-tested design components. Tempest Solutions believes that the Process Accounting approach represents the future of SCM and a foundation for the next big step forward in ERP and CRM systems. Process Accounting is available today either as a conceptual model for a custom solution or as a blueprint for a commercial enterprise software package. For more information write to us at