BPM Lifecycle Research Articles

Not yet another BPM lifecycle: A synthesis of existing approaches using BPMN

ContextBusiness Process Management (BPM) is considered an important management approach that encompasses a set of methods for managing the business processes of an organization. To maximize the benefits of BPM, scholars have conceptualized its steps in schematic diagrams with interrelated phases called BPM lifecycles. As this approach has been established, the phenomenon of perpetual proposition of BPM lifecycles has been observed in relevant literature. This practice obscures what should be relatively straightforward: a consensus among researchers and practitioners regarding the steps that a business process should flow through during its lifecycle. ObjectiveThe aim of this work is to investigate the existing BPM lifecycle models proposed in literature, identify convergences and variations in these models, analyze their core components and locate common patterns that will enable the synthesis of a BPM lifecycle that is conceptualized with Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), the community de-facto business process modeling notation. MethodTo formalize the research problem and develop the design of a solution, the Design Science Research Process (DSRP) model was adopted. To investigate the perpetual proposition of BPM lifecycles in literature, the authors conducted a Systematic Literature Review (SLR). On whether recurring patterns can emerge from the BPM lifecycles, a normalization process was introduced to homogenize the data and four metrics were used to evaluate the results. The emerging patterns were assembled into a graph that formed the basis for proposing a synthetic BPM lifecycle. ResultsThe outcome of the paper is three-fold: First, the identification of four major inefficiencies of existing BPM lifecycles, namely varying granularity, inconsistent nomenclature, subjective polysemy, and lack of formal conceptualization approaches. Also, a standardized definition of the inclusive steps that exist in the lifecycles by clustering the existing ones in a conceptually systematic manner. Finally, a synthetic BPM lifecycle is conceptualized that systematizes the existing concepts and their interrelations based on a formalized BPMN model in two levels of granularity: a basic version that illustrates the functional and control-flow aspects of the BPM lifecycle and an enhanced version incorporating additionally the resource and data perspectives. ConclusionThis paper proposes a BPMN-based conceptualization of the BPM lifecycle that can facilitate the management of business processes by providing enhanced clarity, improved resource management, and predefined error handling in a BPM initiative. By systematizing the control-flow, data, and resource perspective of the BPM lifecycle, stakeholders can gain a clear understanding of the sequence of steps, the interrelated data flows, and the distribution of work.

Defining and Improving the Processes of the Portuguese Project Management Observatory

The Portuguese Project Management Observatory (PPMO) aims to promote and give credibility to Project Management and support professionals and organizations whose activity is developed in this area. This initiative is focused on developing and disseminating scientific knowledge in the context of project management, contributing to improving good project management organizational practices.Business process-driven management is critical for organizations, allowing them to improve their processes and, consequently, improve their organizational performance, given that this management capacity directly influences the value of products and/or services that the organization makes available to the final customer.The PPMO, to better fulfill its mission, intends to adopt a business process-driven management based on a BPM Life Cycle approach. This study reports the process and results achieved during the four phases of that approach.

Business System Information Analysis Process Outcome in Hospital General Bengkayang Area

In the application of the outpatient information system business process at the Bengkayang Regional General Hospital, there are still problems faced, namely the occurrence of incompatibility of patient medical data information in the examination section / poly section, resulting in delays in the patient handling process. This is the background for the author to analyze the business process of outpatient system information at the Bengkayang General Hospital using the Business Process Management Life Cycle method. This study aims to determine how effective it is in managing the outpatient information system business process at the Bengkayang Regional General Hospital. The analytical technique used is BPMN, value chain, business area analysis and the method used is the BPM life cycle. The results of this study can support the current business processes for the better. With the addition and improvement of optimal technology, with existing information system technology to obtain a more detailed and complete procedural flow chart. The resulting procedure flow chart will integrate the data in each part of the service unit in the outpatient department, so that the data can be used together between departments so that data duplication can be avoided.

Using Process Stories to Foster Process Flexibility: The Experts’ Viewpoint

Process flexibility is essential for organizations coping with uncertainty, emergence, and change. In this study, we research how process stories may lessen friction in realizing flexible processes. We use friction as a metaphor, which characterizes the realization of flexible processes as handling two opposing forces: one pushes towards flexibility while the other pulls against flexibility. Using in-depth interviews with BPM experts as a data-gathering technique, we provide insights into the dynamics of friction in the BPM lifecycle. We also provide empirical evidence about the capability of process stories to lessen friction in realizing flexible processes. This research contributes to understand the context where process stories may be most fit to realize process flexibility and adds knowledge about practical complaints experienced by BPM experts when realizing process flexibility.

Extension of the BPM lifecycle to promote the maintainability of BPMN models

Abstract Maintainability is one of the quality attributes of special interest to facilitate the evolution and the maintenance task of business process models in a highly dynamic environment. In this paper, we propose a solution based on a new extension of the BPM lifecycle to promote the maintainability of business process models. Particularly, we considered a set of static maintainability metrics that are tightly related to the modifiability and maintainability of business process models. For the validation of our solution, we apply it in the medical field. We evaluate the static maintainability metrics in the modeling phase in the BPM lifecycle. After this assessment, a set of recommendations is given to allow the designer to improve the maintainability of the considered models and facilitate maintenance tasks in the future.

Procurement Process Analysis Using Process Mining in Cement Manufacturing Company (Case Study PT. Semen Indonesia Persero, Tbk)

Procurement process holds crucial role in companies’ business process, particularly manufacturing company. PT Semen Indonesia as one of manufacturing Companies in Indonesia relies on procurement process in order to fulfill their business. However, existing e-procurement does not cover all the procurement process which creates process variants have made whole procurement process run into bottleneck. Deeper analysis required to dig insights on the process variants to derive the cause of problem. Hence, this research aims to explore Process Mining to gain more insights from the process using data log derived from the system. BPM lifecycle used as an approach to reach the objective of the research. However, not all phases in BPM lifecycle are imposed, yet Process Identification, Process Discovery and Process Analysis. The result showed that top three activities that take time most are Upload to E Procurement, Purchasing Configuration, and Technical Evaluation which require improvements.

A knowledge-intensive adaptive business process management framework

Business process management has been the driving force of optimization and operational efficiency for companies until now, but the digitalization era we have been experiencing requires businesses to be agile and responsive as well. In order to be a part of this digital transformation, delivering new levels of automation-fueled agility through digitalization of BPM itself is required. However, the automation of BPM cannot be achieved by solely focusing on process space and classical planning techniques. It requires a holistic approach that also captures the social aspects of the business environment, such as corporate strategies, organization policies, negotiations, and cooperation. For this purpose, we combine BPM, knowledge-intensive systems and intelligent agent technologies, and yield one consolidated intelligent business process management framework, namely agileBPM, that governs the entire BPM life-cycle. Accordingly, agileBPM proposes a modeling methodology to semantically capture the business interests, enterprise environment and process space in accordance with the agent-oriented software engineering paradigm. The proposed agent-based process execution environment provides cognitive capabilities (such as goal-driven planning, norm compliance, knowledge-driven actions, and dynamic cooperation) on top of the developed business models to support knowledge workers’ multi-criteria decision making tasks. The context awareness and exception handling capabilities of the proposed approach have been presented with experimental studies. Through comparative evaluations, it is shown that agileBPM is the most comprehensive knowledge-intensive process management solution.

Analisis Proses Bisnis pada Dinas Perdagangan Kota XYZ dengan Menggunakan Business Process Management Lifecycle

The XYZ City Trade Office is a government organization that is engaged in regulating the stability of staple food through trade activities in XYZ City. This study aims to identify the existing business processes at the XYZ City Trade Office, in addition to being identified, this study will also conduct an analysis and improvement and redesign of the business processes currently being implemented by the XYZ City Trade Office. The steps taken to identify business processes are by conducting interviews related to the duties and functions of each entity and the Office to stakeholders in the XYZ City Trade Office. The methodology used to identify, describe, analyze and redesign business processes is the Business Process Life Cycle (BPM Lifecycle). The identification results are 36 business processes, and 3 of them are export business processes, import business processes, and processes Business Can Send and Evaluate. In all three business processes further evaluation and analysis are carried out. The analysis and evaluation is to first describe the business process in the form of business process modeling notation (BPMN) using bizagi modeller, then measure the quality of business processes, and analyze weaknesses, and compare with the duties and functions of the Ministry of Trade of the Republic of Indonesia, so that improvements to the process for the third the business process. Improvements for the Export and Import business processes are by adding oversight processes at the shipping stage, and business process improvements Conducting Shipment and Evaluation is by removing the activities of Giving Delivery News.
 
 Keywords: Business Process, BPMN, BPM Lifecycle, Bizagi Modeller

Implementation of Aspect-oriented Business Process Models with Web Services

In software development, crosscutting concerns, such as security, audit, access control, authentication, logging, persistence, transaction, error handling etc. can be modularized using the aspect-oriented paradigm. In business process modeling, aspects have been used to reduce visualization complexity, increase reuse and improve model maintainability. There are techniques which address aspects in modeling and implementation phases of business process; however, these techniques adopt different semantic representations, hindering the integration of these phases into the BPM lifecycle. This work proposes an architecture for service discovery capable of selecting web services that implement crosscutting concerns and meet the goals established in the aspect modeling phase, executing them accordingly with a prioritization. A proof of concept to analyze the proposed architecture and generated artifacts was performed. Afterwards, the proposal was evaluated by means of an experiment. The results suggest that the definition of an operational goal enables the business specialists to concentrate on the modeling of the aspect without necessarily concerning its implementation, since a proper option for implementation is discovered during the execution of the process.

Improving parent teacher meeting process through business process management life-cycle approach

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose and validate the process of parent teacher meeting in private schools through applying BPM life-cycle approach and using quality tools to fill the gap of standardized practices for parent teacher meeting (PTM).Design/methodology/approachBPM life-cycle approach (Dumas et al., 2013) was used and two focus groups were conducted at first and second stage. The recommendations of previous studies for third, fourth and fifth stage of BPM and quality tools like SIPOC chart, responsibility assignment matrix (RAM) and CTQ trees were used for process management.FindingsThe previous studies reveal that, in developing countries, most of the private schools are not fully aware from the benefits of PTM. Beside, where the evidence of PTM is seen in few instances, no standardized process is available to conduct an effective PTM process. Owing to long-term sustainability and reciprocate economic benefits, school management is desired to have a standardized PTM process for an effective all-round performance. Likewise, the parents have a lot of expectations from schools and they want to be treated in a mannered way in which their complaints are formally addressed from the school management. The authors formulated all three phases from start to end process. The proposed process is validated in four private schools and got satisfactory results in terms of increased parents’ participation and decreased number of complaints.Research limitations/implicationsThis process will facilitate school managers to deal with parents effectively, collect the data from PTM, analyze it and use for the continuous improvement. Implementation of this process will ensure better meeting environment for the parents as well as for the teachers. The study bridges between quality management tools and BPM approach to improve the state of art of BPM practices that will lead to generate a trend of application of quality tools and management theories in private schooling industry.Originality/valueThe authors first time used BPM life-cycle approach to manage the process of PTM in private schools. The authors design a process to match the working of schools and the application of desired quality tools.

Evaluation of the StrAli-BPM approach: strategic alignment with BPM using agreements in different levels

Business process modelling languages do not usually represent non-functional requirements, focusing only on the functional ones. In order to fill this gap, the StrAli-BPM (strategic alignment with BPM) approach was presented. StrAli-BPM is divided in BLA@BPMN and BLA2SLA: the former extends BPMN to embody non-functional requirements through business level agreements (BLAs); the latter supports the creation of a set of service level agreements (SLAs) based on a particular BLA. This paper describes the results obtained with the evaluation of StrAli-BPM. The approach was evaluated by a proof of concept, based on prototype tools, which enabled us to verify its technical applicability. Moreover, a survey was conducted, in qualitative terms, with a panel of experts. As a result, StrAli-BPM was well accepted by the experts who judged it as important and necessary to completely cover the BPM lifecycle. Some lessons learned from both evaluations are presented.

Business Process Management in Higher Education. The Case of Students of Logistics

The article contains an introduction to BPM and presents the examples of BPM deployment in high schools. The main part of the article contains the key preparation and realization stages of BPM course for students of logistics at Maria Curie-Sk³odowska University (MCSU) in Poland. The main conclusions from the BPM market analysis and course preparation suggest that BPM competences are strongly desirable and BPN can be a powerful tool for improving organizational efficiency. Availability of many standards and tools makes it difficult to develop BPM course tailored to market needs and study programmes. Moreover ideal teaching software should cover the wide range of models and most popular standards as well as should reflect the whole BPM lifecycle. To meet the requirements we enhanced ADONIS software with tools for process automation like Bonita Suite.

Quality Assessment of an Emergency Care Process Model based on Static and Dynamic Metrics

Healthcare domain is a vital domain in which many processes are dealt with. More precisely, in an emergency department, it is fundamental to have an emergency care process with high quality. In this paper, we propose a solution based on an improved BPM lifecycle for assessing and improving the quality of such a process, using quality metrics. These metrics are inspired from those of software engineering and are classified into two main categories: static metrics and dynamic metrics. Static metrics are applied to BPMN models and allow obtaining values related to complexity and coupling. Dynamic metrics concern the execution of BPMN models and obtain their values from log files. Our proposed approach has been applied for the emergency care process. For this purpose, we evaluated its quality in two steps (static then dynamic) and finally some recommendations have been given in order to allow the designer to improve our emergency care process model.

Fuzzy TOPSIS evaluation approach for business process management software acquisition

AbstractAt the present time, Business Process Management software (BPMS) implementation is on focus of organizations. To implement a BPMS in a firm successfully, selecting a suitable BPMS is critical. Evaluation and selection of the BPMS software is complex and a time consuming decision-making process. This paper propounds an approach for dealing with such a decision. This approach introduces functional, non-functional and fuzzy evaluation method for BPMS evaluation. The presented BPM lifecycle based approach breaks down BPMS evaluation and selection criteria into two broad categories namely functional and non-functional requirements including totally 48 selection criteria. A facile Fuzzy Technique for Order Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (FTOPSIS) is customized for BPMS selection based on identified criteria. The provided approach is applied to a port and maritime organization in order to evaluate and acquire a BPMS and the provided numerical example illustrates the applicability of the appro...

Linking Natural Modeling to Techno-centric Modeling for the Active Involvement of Process Participants in Business Process Design

Actively involving participants in business process modeling enables integration between elicitation and modeling steps of the BPM lifecycle. Such integration may lead to a more efficient design procedure and ultimately to a more accurate representation of the business process. However, active involvement of process participants creates several challenges, as the latter are not expected to have modeling skills. The purpose of this paper is to present a business process design approach, called CoMPArE /WP, which tightly integrates the elicitation and modeling stages of process design, through the active involvement of process participants. To achieve effective involvement of process participants, CoMPArE/WP adopts the principles of natural modeling. However, being a business process design approach aiming at supporting the whole BPM lifecycle, CoMPArE /WP deals also with the transition of natural modeling to formal process representations that can be enacted using a BPMS.

MODEL FOR INTEGRATED MONITORING OF BPEL BUSINESS PROCESSES

Business process execution language (BPEL) does not provide a native support for defining data and metrics, required to perform business activity monitoring (BAM). Existing industry solutions are vendor-specific while platform-independent scientific approaches separate tightly coupled monitoring definitions from the core BPEL processes into external descriptors, thus increasing the complexity of the development, packaging and deployment processes. Furthermore, existing monitoring solutions reuse platform-specific audit trail events. This requires monitor model developers to be familiar with the details of the process implementation and the custom BPEL engine meta-model. To overcome these issues, this paper presents bpelx4bam — a new approach to defining monitoring data and metrics within BPEL processes, based on BPEL extensions. The bpelx4bam promotes these definitions into the first class citizens of the BPEL specification in order to unify and fully integrate BAM into the BPM lifecycle. It enables a cross-platform migration of BAM-enabled business processes, removes the need for separate models and specifications, eases development, packaging and deployment processes, aligns the separation of concerns with actual process roles and introduces BAM-specific and optimized events. Therefore, it presents a solid ground for a future specification or a standard in this area.

Constraint-based planning and scheduling techniques for the optimized management of business processes

Nowadays, a growing interest in aligning information systems in a process-oriented way exists as well as in the effective business process management BPM. Since an instance of a business process BP is analogous to a plan which also includes allocation of resources, planning and scheduling P&S techniques can be very helpful for increasing the efficiency in BPM. In this work, innovative and rather relevant contributions related to constraint-based P&S approaches are proposed to optimize different stages of the BPM life cycle.

Key challenges for enabling agile BPM with social software

AbstractBusiness Process Management is called agile when it is able to react quickly and adequately to internal and external events. Agile Business Process Management requires putting the life cycle of business processes on a new paradigm. It is advocated in this paper that social software allows us to satisfy the key requirements for enabling agile BPM by applying the four features of social software: weak ties, social production, egalitarianism and mutual service provision. Organizational and semantic integration and responsiveness (of the business processes engineering, execution and management activities) have been identified as the main requirements for implementing an agile BPM life cycle. Social software may be used in the BPM life cycle in several manners and using numerous approaches. This paper presents seven among them and then analyzes the ‘support’ effects between those approaches and the underlying social software features, and the three requirements for Agile BPM. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.