Activity planning and management in business organizations

New models and new tools are needed for analyzing and improving strategic and operational decisions within an extended enterprise. This paper exploits the expressiveness of UML diagrams to facilitate the analysis of the enterprise processes involved in activity planning and management. An extended enterprise is decomposed into business units which exchange data, negotiate and collaborate. The distribution of work among business units results from a negotiation process which is analyzed through the sequence of messages exchanged by the business units. The internal elements of a business unit perform functions such as activity analysis and decomposition, task evaluation and monitoring.