Mechanisms are the IDEF0 concept of a resource that is required for a task for some duration, and may be available for performing other tasks as well. Mechanisms are objects the business process must use efficiently to perform a given set of tasks. A business representation has three parts. It has a history of past activities, a backlog of activities to accomplish, and a set of mechanisms that can be used to perform the tasks. Planning is the process of assigning a detailed schedule that uses available mechanisms to perform the backlog of tasks in a way that matches historical performance measures.
MOEs are usually linear combinations of resource consumption measurements.
Typical MOEs weigh the total time that each resource is used in an activity, and the resources applied, offset by the idle time when any resource is not used for any necessary business activity. They may also include costs and prices, customer survey data, market share, or other measures of the environment in which the business functions. The balanced scorecard concept is a way of ensuring that the activities a business performs are appropriately balanced for value creation. The amount of resources spent on each historic activity are measured, projected into budgeted resource amounts, and used as goals to drive reengineering of the business process for the activity backlog. The scorecard is a way of budgeting resource MOEs so they can be realistically applied to the backlog.