Managing Business Process Variants at eBay

The issue of business process variants management has been addressed several times already. However new situations with their own specific arise all the time, and proper solutions need to be developed in order to address such specific context. Process variants management at eBay is an example of such a situation. Variants are imposed by business facts, and only for a single process there could be more than 8000 variants. In this paper we introduce an ontology based approach to address the management of business process variants. The ontology based solution relates business context with reusable process flow elements, thus binding the reason for which a variant has been introduced with the variant itself. Variants can be later compared and queried for based on this relationship. In such a context, first, one has to model for reuse to be able to model with reuse. In order to provide a complete process variants management approach, the ontology based solution is complemented by an inheritance mechanism.