Example: Functional Area Analysis
Relationships
Main Description

In this example, we consider an automobile rental company.  We are working in the current project to improve the core aspects of rental management.  We identify five domains, those being:

  • Marketing and Customer Management
  • Products
  • Rentals Management
  • Rental Fleet Logistics
  • Business Administration

For now, we will focus on the first four domains.

Identifying the Functional Areas

Each domain is analyzed to identify the major functions it is responsible for. Analysis results can be captured in a visual model that groups functional areas by domain.

For Rent-a-car, we break the domains into functional areas by identifying major functional responsibilities for each domain in focus: Marketing and Customer management, Products, Rental Fleet Logistics, and Rentals Management.

A major functional area of the Marketing and Customer Management domain is Customer Service. For this example, we fill focus on this area. 

For the Products domain, Promotions Management is a major functional area identified for further analysis, because promotions affect rental pricing.

Fleet Management is a major functional area for the Rental Fleet Logistics domain that plays a role in the reservation process, for example where vehicle availability information is important.

Rentals Management has been decomposed into three major functional areas: Rental, Reservations, and Pricing. The Reservation and Rental functional areas provide the most customer visible aspects of the car rental experience. Pricing is a key function for completing a reservation, as well as for completion of the vehicle rental at check-in.

These will be the core functional areas for this example.

There is actually an overlap across several domains regarding pricing, but we have chosen to emphasize just the pricing aspect of Rentals Management, because this is the aspect of pricing that is most directly related to the example. The Products domain establishes baseline pricing guidelines that account for standard cost and profit policies. Marketing and Customer Management information combined with information from Rental Fleet Logistics information and other marketplace related criteria supports special promotional pricing by the Products domain. Marketing and Customer Management influences the criteria by which pricing schedules are applied to various customer types.

Nevertheless, whatever led to the establishment of pricing schedules, in this specific example, it is Rentals Management where the prices are actually used during the reservation and rental. In a different scenario, other aspects of pricing could be the focus area. 

Further analysis will consider the interdependencies that begin to emerge as analysis delves deeper into these functions. For example, as part of Reservations, it would be advantageous to adjust pricing due to oversupply of vehicles of a particular class at a particular location that Fleet Management is aware of.

Each functional area is described with a concise textual explanation.  Further analysis -- such as mapping the functional areas into business processes or performing business use case analysis -- would reveal the services each functional area requires and offers, as well as which functional areas are related due to needs to communicate during the execution of the business processes.