Glages: Why Building the Factory Is Difficult
The idea of reusable formal business models is easy to summarize. Building a factory that can produce them reliably is difficult.
The challenge is not generating descriptions of processes. LLMs can already produce convincing explanations. The challenge is creating models that remain coherent, machine-checkable, composable, reusable, and useful in real execution.
A Common Core
Models from different domains must share compatible base concepts and relationships.
Payment, refund, shipment, delivery, approval, and claim handling cannot each invent their own meaning for Entity, state, result, authority, and change. Without a common typed core, composition becomes a translation project and contradictions remain hidden.
The core must be expressive enough for many domains but controlled enough to support verification.
Resolution of Meaning
Source material rarely uses one consistent vocabulary.
Two terms may describe the same concept, or one term may hide several different concepts. A policy may combine a business state with a technical status. Different departments may describe the same event from incompatible perspectives.
The factory must resolve these differences before formal construction. Otherwise, the model merely encodes the contradictions more neatly.
Verification Independent from Generation
A plausible model fragment is not sufficient.
The factory must check structural consistency, required relationships, permitted transitions, valid results, stopping conditions, and compatibility with other models. It must identify meaning that exists only in names rather than in formal structure.
Generation and verification must remain separate. The system cannot rely on the same probabilistic judgment as the only source of correctness.
Composition
A process model may be correct in isolation and still conflict with another model when composed.
Shared Entities may have incompatible states. One process may assume a result that another never produces. Two processes may both claim authority over the same change. A boundary that is safe locally may become incomplete in the larger domain.
Composition therefore requires its own methodology and verification.
Rare Cases
Common cases are easy to find and easy to demonstrate. Rare combinations often define the real difficulty of automation.
A case that occurs once a year in one company may occur every day across thousands of companies. The factory must model classes of situations rather than merely imitate the frequency distribution of one organization’s history.
This requires deliberate search for missing combinations, negative cases, and boundary conditions.
The Accumulated Asset
The factory becomes defensible through the combination of its common core, production methodology, verification mechanisms, reusable models, accumulated tests, corrections, validated cases, and composition capability.
No single element is enough. A language without models has little market value. A model library without reliable verification cannot support controlled execution. A collection of case studies without a common core does not compose.
The factory is difficult to build because it must turn distributed and inconsistent business knowledge into a coherent production system without exposing the execution to hidden interpretation.
That difficulty is also the source of its value.