REA-Based Business Process Adaptation

Abstract

Business process modeling is an important activity for both organizational design and for the planning and analysis of information systems that support an organization's business processes. Our goal is to help business analysts produce detailed models of the business processes that best reflect the needs of their organizations. To this end, we propose to, a) leverage the best practices in terms of a catalog of generic business processes, and b) provide analysts with tools to customize those processes by generating new process variants around automatically identified process variants. We use business patterns from the Resource Event Agent ontology to identify variation points, and to codify the model transformations inherent in the generation of the process variants. We developed a prototype, showing the computational feasibility of the approach, and validated the relevance of the variation points, and the correctness of corresponding transformations in the context of ERP key processes, showing the conceptual soundness of the approach.