Setting up a financial framework for analysing DBPM (Decentralised
Business Process Management) we are going to use the following
considerations:
From a unit economical point of view the most important element that
directly carries the cost and indirectly generates revenue is an atomic t
transaction. A p process is set up as executing and validating a sequence of t transactions.In the business model, we distinguish two levels of the business. Core platform is responsible for executing decentralised transactions and processes. On the top of the core platform industry specific solutions can be delivered with the help of partner companies. On a long run industry specific solutions could be implemented directly by partner companies, however it is probably not realistic on a short run. As a consequence initial financial models consider both the development of the core platform and some of the industry specific solutions.
Costs structure is based on the following elements [Figure 1]:
1. Variable cost:
a. CoGS is mostly based on executing and
validating the transactions on a decentralised consensus. It can be easily
scale up or down depending on the customer needs. As opposed to a general
Turing complete Blockchain system where executing a transaction might be pretty
expensive due to the possibility of the infinite loops, at DBPM runtime of the
atomic transactions are always limited from above, implying O(|T|) execution cost for a set of T
transactions. The exact cost pretty much depends on the consensus mechanism,
implying different numbers at proof of work, at proof of stake or at majority
voting.
b. CoGS is also influenced by storing the states
of the validated transactions of a p process. It is manifested as a
general storage cost that will be increased as the process itself is used. It
requires further considerations if the whole state between two transactions is
directly and fully stored in the Blockchain itself or rather off-chain solution
might be used and only hash of the state is stored in the Blockchain.
c. Supporting the system to partner companies or
end-users is manifested as an additional variable cost.
2. Fix cost factors are mainly the SG&A expenses for running the
company itself. As the primary focus is on the partner business, the most
important is the professional business development as CAC.
3. Investment: For a successfully start both
the core framework and the first two or three industry specific solutions must
be ready. They requires a certain amount of development and initial investment.
Revenue structure has the following factors [Figure 1]:
1. Core services: customers get the value
of using a certain business process itself. As executing a business process
practically means executing a set of state changing transactions, it makes
sense to charge money after transactions.
2. Extended services might be possible as
well, as providing training or consulting. It might be however a possibility
that the company concentrates only core functionalities and every extended
service is provided only by partner companies.
Figure 5. General
cash-flow schema.
