How Do You Know That You Are Not Leaking Money?

How do you know that you are not leaking money? I'm looking at parallel procurement processes of a certain company and the previous question occurs to me.

Sure it may be easy to do for a retail store where at the end of the day you balance your books and do some reconciliation for discrepancies. However, how does one do it for an enterprise with multiple sales channels and supply chains all with varying schedules and commitments. That still looks like its manageable if you stick with plain buying or selling. However, modern business processes go beyond that, they more into the meta level, that is where the rights to buy is in itself something that is exchanged (i.e. Contracts).

Well all know of Enron's debacle, essentially a complex concoction of derivatives that nobody had a clue of what was involved or if they did, as to how to measure it and ultimately how to manage it. Any innovative new business process needs to not only capture the process but figure out if the entire mess of interactions truly leads to a profitable outcome.

What I'm looking for is a way to model the financial commitments of a company and mapping it back to the actual business processes. I've heard of the Resource-Event-Agent (REA) framwork for representing and reasoning about economic exchanges, however I don't know how applicable it is with contracts.

Speech act theory is another promising area wherein actions go beyond information or imperative kinds but include the kinds that involve contracts and commitments. There was some earlier work done (FLBC) to tailor something similar in a business context. See years of programming in the imperative way has made us completely blind to the fact that the world doesn't act on command without some kind of compensation. Just ask the bellhop who took your bags up to your hotel room!

Finally, Jean-Marc Eber and Peyton Jones have come up with Financial Contract combinators that appear to help the representation and reasoning of complex financial instruments.

Okay, so lets say you built some business process management system (i.e. BPM) with pi-calculus underpinings. Drive it with public interfaces based on speech act theory. Then bolt in some financial combinators just to make sure everything is sound and prevent us from going straight to backruptcy. Anyone got this kind of system? Unfortunately, right now, nobody does and nobody knows if their boat is really leaking!