It can be useful not to display the names of the processors involved in executing a function, e.g., for data protection reasons. After initializing the PPM client database, in the PPM front-end you can use the Organizational units administration component to specify how the names of the processors occurring in the instance data are replaced by the names of organizational units (anonymized).
When aggregating process instances, the information on the processor of functions is lost. To transfer information about the processors into an aggregated EPC, they must be anonymized.
To do this, you create PPM organizational units and assign all relevant processors to organizational units. When importing date, the names of the processors are replaced by the names of the corresponding organizational unit.
An organizational unit is defined by the following properties in the PPM system:
User interface item |
Description |
---|---|
Name |
Name of the organizational unit (freely selectable) |
Processor |
List of processors that are assigned to the selected organizational unit |
Cost rate |
Cost of a member of staff from an organizational unit per unit of time. The cost rate affects the calculation of certain measures in the process cost calculation (see chapter Definition of process cost measures). |
Ignore during measure calculation |
The selected organizational unit is not included in the measure calculation. This may be specified, for example, when processors perform batch processing functions (so-called batch users). |
All non-assigned processors to this organizational unit |
Processors that are not assigned to an organizational unit are anonymized using the name of this organizational unit. |
You can use the runppmconfig command line program to export organizational units to an XML file that you can also modify manually. For further information about the command line program, please refer to the PPM Operation Guide.
Example
Mr Brown and Mrs Smith work in the Order acceptance department, Mr Miller in the Accounting department. When importing data, the processors Mr Brown and Mrs Smith are replaced by the name of the Order acceptance organizational unit, while Mr Miller is replaced by the name Accounting, while all other processors are replaced by the name of the default organizational unit, Not specified. The specified cost rates are used by the Measure calculator for process cost analysis.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
<!DOCTYPE orgunitlist SYSTEM "orgunits.dtd">
<orgunitlist>
<orgunit isdefault="NO" isbatchuser="NO">
<name>ORDER ACCEPTANCE</name>
<costrate>15.75 EUR_PER_HOUR</costrate>
<user>Mrs Smith</user>
<user>Mr Brown</user>
</orgunit>
<orgunit isdefault="NO" isbatchuser="NO">
<name>ACCOUNTING</name>
<costrate>25.3 EUR_PER_HOUR</costrate>
<user>Mr Miller</user>
</orgunit>
<orgunit isdefault="YES" isbatchuser="NO">
<name>Not specified</name>
<costrate>24 EUR_PER_HOUR</costrate>
<user>DUMMY</user>
</orgunit>
</orgunitlist>
The document type definition orgunits.dtd for this XML file looks like this:
You can import the XML file created when initializing the database by specifying the file name, so that anonymizing rules are available immediately.