Business Process Management Technology Research Articles

A Smart Contract Architecture Framework for Insurance Industry Using Blockchain and Business Process Management Technology

A Smart Contract Architecture Framework for Insurance Industry Using Blockchain and Business Process Management Technology

A Novel Process Recommendation Method That Integrates Disjoint Paths and Sequential Patterns

As the primary means of modern enterprise management, business process management (BPM) technology has become the mainstream development trend of modern enterprise management. The efficient and accurate establishment of business processes is essential for effective BPM. However, the traditional manual-based modeling approach is time-consuming and error-prone. To overcome this, process recommendation technology can improve the intelligence and efficiency of modeling to a certain extent. However, existing process modeling recommendation methods suffer from the problem of low accuracy and neglecting short-process models. Therefore, a novel process modeling recommendation method that integrates disjoint paths and sequential patterns was proposed. This method uses edge-disjoint paths for the first time to represent the behavioral semantics of processes, and an improved contiguous sequential pattern mining algorithm was proposed to mine the contiguous path sequential patterns (CPSPs) of edge-disjoint paths. In the process modeling recommendation stage, the k CPSPs with the highest matching degree with the current reference model process were calculated, and the last node in these CPSPs was used as the set of recommendation nodes. In cases with CPSPs with the same matching degree, the one with the higher value was recommended according to their corresponding lift, confidence, and support degrees. Through experimental evaluation and comparison, it was shown that the proposed method effectively improved the accuracy of the recommendation of both short-process and long-process models while ensuring effectiveness and time efficiency.

Business Process Management and Process Mining Technologies: The progress of a discipline

A wide variety of approaches, strategies, and tools for designing, implementing, managing, and analyzing functional business processes have emerged from studies in business process management (BPM). It is the goal of the emerging topic of research known as process mining (PM) to improve the analysis of business process models by gleaning actionable insights from massive quantities of event logs. The purpose of this study is to research business process management and process mining by surveying the state-of-the-art methods and tools in each area and highlighting the most recent developments. This study concludes with a discussion of BPM and PM, in which PM acts as a bridge between BPM and data science to enhance business processes (BPs).

МОДЕЛЮВАННЯ СИСТЕМИ ЗБАЛАНСОВАНИХ КРИТЕРІЇВ УПРАВЛІННЯ БІЗНЕС-ПРОЦЕСАМИ

Questions related to the need to change the management procedure and the introduction of business processes into the activities of any organization are relevant in the conditions of the world's rapidly developing economic system. The growing need for managers to coordinate the organization's actions and systematize human resources management is due to the goal of unifying the satisfaction of market demand. Companies all over the world are looking for new levers that will allow them to take leading positions in the market. A high-quality, competently constructed system of business processes and other factors supporting competitiveness become the minimum condition for presence on the world market. Under these conditions, it is especially important to ensure the proper functioning of individual production enterprises, which is confirmed by the growth of its market value. Solving the issues of increasing business efficiency is impossible without the formation of an effective business model. For the prosperity of the enterprise, the manager needs not only to plan and analyze the process of performing the main tasks, but also to be able to manage all business processes and control them, to achieve consistency in the actions of employees. In order to remain competitive in today's market, a business must be cost efficient. In order to achieve the efficiency of the processes, it is necessary to adjust the flow of activities. Any activity is a process, and business process management (BPM) is a technology of effective process management in order to achieve their maximum efficiency. BPM technology sets the task of automating the management of processes in your business, allowing, nevertheless, to transform it later. Optimizing business processes is a necessary tool for ensuring the efficiency of enterprises in modern conditions of globalization. BPM includes a number of systemic aspects. The enterprise is considered as an open system with inputs, processing and outputs. Effective operation of the enterprise is ensured by alignment with strategic goals. The implementation of each of the principles of management helps to better satisfy the interests and needs of consumers and improve the results of the enterprises.

Integrating process management and event processing in smart factories: A systems architecture and use cases

The developments of new concepts for an increased digitization of manufacturing industries in the context of Industry 4.0 have brought about novel system architectures and frameworks for smart production systems. These range from generic frameworks for Industry 4.0 to domain-specific architectures for Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). While most of the approaches include a service-based architecture for selective integration with enterprise systems, a close two-way integration of the production control systems and IIoT sensors and actuators with Process-Aware Information Systems (PAIS) on the management level for automation and mining of production processes is rarely discussed. This fusion of Business Process Management (BPM) with IIoT can be mutually beneficial for both research areas, but is still in its infancy. We propose a systems architecture for IIoT that shows how to integrate the low-level hardware components–sensors and actuators–of a smart factory with BPM systems. We discuss the software components and their interactions to address challenges of device encapsulation, integration of sensor events, and interaction with existing BPM systems. This integration is demonstrated within several use cases regarding process modeling, automation and mining for a smart factory model, showing benefits of using BPM technologies to analyze, control, and adapt discrete production processes in IIoT.

Impacto de la tecnología business process management en la atención a clientes de organizaciones privadas

La tecnología hoy en día juega un rol muy importante en la manera como las empresas se manejan para conseguir ventaja competitiva en el mercado; por lo cual, la presente investigación se enfoca en el impacto que genera la tecnología Business Process Management (Gestión de procesos de negocio) en la atención a clientes de organizaciones privadas, es por ello que el objetivo de estudio es evaluar la influencia de la BPM en la mejora de los procesos que se realizan dentro del área de atención al cliente; con este fin se identificaron las actividades que se desarrollan en el departamento de atención al cliente, donde se detectaron los cuellos de botella y se analizaron las ventajas-desventajas de utilizar BPM dentro de las organizaciones. La metodología utilizada es exploratoria-descriptiva, donde se aplicó una encuesta a 458 gerentes y/o encargados empresariales, además se utilizó la herramienta SPSS-25 para el análisis de datos, por lo cual, se concluyó que de las empresas que conocen de la existencia de la BPM, son muy pocas las que lo aplican al software ya sea por desconocimiento de las ventajas que pueden lograr tanto en automatización de procesos, mejora de tiempos, eficiencia en la atención al cliente; aunque poco a poco se está cambiando la mentalidad de los encargados implementando páginas web, compras online, facturación electrónica, entre otros, aún falta darle un giro al modelo de negocio y establecer nuevas estrategias que llevarán a la empresa al éxito, por lo cual, se ha considerado que para futuras investigaciones se debe realizar un análisis específico de acuerdo con el giro del negocio y el tipo de cliente que tiene cada empresa.

The Internet of Things Meets Business Process Management: A Manifesto

The Internet of Things (IoT) refers to a network of connected devices collecting and exchanging data over the Internet. These things can be artificial or natural, and interact as autonomous agents forming a complex system. In turn, Business Process Management (BPM) was established to analyze, discover, design, implement, execute, monitor and evolve collaborative business processes within and across organizations. While the IoT and BPM have been regarded as separate topics in research and practice, we strongly believe that the management of IoT applications will strongly benefit from BPM concepts, methods and technologies on the one hand; on the other one, the IoT poses challenges that will require enhancements and extensions of the current state-of-the-art in the BPM field. In this paper, we question to what extent these two paradigms can be combined and we discuss the emerging challenges.

Every apprentice needs a master: Feedback-based effectiveness improvements for process model matching

Process models are a central element of modern business process management technology. When adopting such technology, organizations inevitably establish process model collections which, depending on the degree of adoption, can reach sizes of thousands of models. Process model matching techniques are intended to assist experts in the management of such large collections, e.g., in querying the collections and in comparing process models. Yet, as demonstrated in comparative evaluations, existing techniques struggle to achieve a high effectiveness on real-world datasets, limiting their practical applicability. This is partly due to these techniques being fully automated and relying on universal knowledge bases that insufficiently represent the domain semantics of model collections.To increase effectiveness and to progress on the path to practical applicability, we pursue the idea of integrating expert feedback into the matching process, so as to continuously update the knowledge base and achieve a better domain adaptation. In particular, we present ADBOT, a matching technique that relies on expert feedback in terms of corrected matching results. Our contributions are twofold. First, we introduce different strategies to utilize expert feedback in the matching process and to improve its effectiveness. Second, we provide heuristics for guiding experts through a model collection intended to reduce the amount of collected feedback while still maximizing the gains of learning from it. Based on five separate real-world datasets we provide empirical evidence towards the feasibility of our matcher. In the experiments, ADBOT (i) achieves high f-measures of up to .90, (ii) improves the effectiveness of baseline matchers by up to 88%, (iii) yields high recall values due to the detection of correspondences that automated matchers fail to achieve, and (iv) still increases effectiveness when the feedback contains errors. We also discuss evidence that substantiates ADBOT’s individual components, amongst others demonstrating that the guidance heuristics can maximize effectiveness, while minimizing human effort.

A novel completeness definition of event logs and corresponding generation algorithm

AbstractAs the promotion of technologies and applications of Big Data, the research of business process management (BPM) has gradually deepened to consider the impacts and challenges of big business data on existing BPM technologies. Recently, parallel business process mining (e.g. discovering business models from business visual data, integrating runtime business data with interactive business process monitoring visualisation systems and summarising and visualising historical business data for further analysis, etc.) and multi‐perspective business data analytics (e.g. pattern detecting, decision‐making and process behaviour predicting, etc.) have been intensively studied considering the steep increase in business data size and type. However, comprehensive and in‐depth testing is needed to ensure their quality. Testing based solely on existing business processes and their system logs is far from sufficient. Large‐scale randomly generated models and corresponding complete logs should be used in testing. To test parallel algorithms for discovering process models, different log completeness and generation algorithms were proposed. However, they suffer from either state space explosion or non‐full‐covering task dependencies problem. Besides, most existing generation algorithms rely on random executing strategy, which leads to low and unstable efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel log completeness type, that is, #TAR completeness, as well as its generation algorithm. The experimental results based on a series of randomly generated process models show that the #TAR complete logs outperform the state‐of‐the‐art ones with lower capacity, fuller dependencies covering and higher generating efficiency.

Business process management in the port sector: a literature review

Purpose This paper aims to review the application of business process management (BPM) in the port sector. Its objective is to understand whether BPM principles are applied in the port sector, the role of the procedural factor in port performance evaluation and whether electronic data interchange systems have been used for process management purposes. Design/methodology/approach The objective of this research is to conduct a critical review of existing academic literature in the domain of BPM and its application in the ports sector. This paper assessed more than a hundred recent publications, from key journals in the domains of port economics, BPM and information technology. The two principle platforms used are the online databases of the World Bank Group and the University of Antwerp. Findings Academic literature reviewed reveals a partial application of BPM in the port and maritime sector. BPM related research is conducted via the utilization of modeling algorithms or optimization and simulation tools. There exists evidence that electronic data interchange (EDI) data extracted from EDI platforms can be used to model inter-organizational business processes in several industries. Yet, to the best of the author’s knowledge, no research investigates Port Community System (PCS) or single window (SW) data utilization for BPM purposes, although PCS and SW benefits are well documented. Port performance is largely assessed based on the production theory, and limited number of studies use elements of procedural efficiency as variables for their analysis. Originality/value The holistic application of BPM has been researched in numerous industries but in the port sector. This paper constitutes the first section of an original research study to define key components, assumptions and constraints for developing a comprehensive BPM framework in the port sector.

Analyzing Linkage Between Business Process Management (BPM) Capability and Information Technology: A Case Study in Garment SMEs

Business Process Management (BPM) and Information Technology (IT) have received a lot of attention. However, the research mainly focuses on the application of BPM and the value of IT to support business processes and has not yet linked BPM capabilities and IT usage. The aim of this study is to define the linkage between BPM capability and IT needs for garment SMEs in order to ensure that the application of IT can be aligned with the organizational business objectives. This study used a qualitative method with a case study approach on a single garment SMEs in Jember Regency, East Java. The informants in this research is the SME’s owner. Data collection was conducted through interviews and direct observation. The results showed that the garment SME needs BPM related to several aspects, i.e. process definition and documentation, process measurement and management, market or customer orientation, and supplier perspective. This finding is expected to give contributions to garment SMEs in order to develop and implement IT and eventually enhance the performance and competitiveness of garment SMEs.

An Anti-Noise Process Mining Algorithm Based on Minimum Spanning Tree Clustering

Many human-centric systems have begun to use business process management technology in production. With the operation of business process management systems, more and more business process logs and human-centric data have been accumulated. However, the effective utilization and analysis of these event logs are challenges that people need to solve urgently. Process mining technology is a branch of business process management technology. It can extract process knowledge from event logs and build process models, which helps to detect and improve business processes. The current process mining algorithms are inadequate in dealing with log noise. The family of alpha-algorithms ignores the impact of noise, which is unrealistic in real-life logs. Most of the process mining algorithms that can handle noise also lack reasonable denoising thresholds. In this paper, a new assumption on noise is given. Furthermore, an anti-noise process mining algorithm that can deal with noise is proposed. The decision rules of the selective, parallel, and non-free choice structures are also given. The proposed algorithm framework discovers the process model and transforms it into a Petri network representation. We calculate the distance between traces to build the minimum spanning tree on which clusters are generated. The traces of the non-largest clusters are treated as noise, and the largest cluster is mined. Finally, the algorithm can discover the regular routing structure and solve the problem of noise. The experimental results show the correctness of the algorithm when compared with the $\alpha$ ++ algorithm.

Experimental application of Business Process Management technology to manage clinical pathways: a pediatric kidney transplantation follow up case

BackgroundTo test the application of Business Process Management technology to manage clinical pathways, using a pediatric kidney transplantation as case study, and to identify the benefits obtained from using this technology.MethodsUsing a Business Process Management platform, we implemented a specific application to manage the clinical pathway of pediatric patients, and monitored the activities of the coordinator in charge of the case management during a 6-month period (from June 2015 to November 2015) using two methodologies: the traditional procedure and the one under study.ResultsThe application helped physicians and nurses to optimize the amount of time and resources devoted to management purposes. In particular, time reduction was close to 60%. In addition, the reduction of data duplication, the integrated event management and the efficient data collection improved the quality of the service.ConclusionsThe use of Business Process Management technology, usually related to well-defined processes with high management costs, is an established procedure in multiple environments; its use in healthcare, however, is innovative. The use of already accepted clinical pathways is known to improve outcomes. The combination of these two techniques, well established in their respective areas of application, could represent a revolution in clinical pathway management. The study has demonstrated that the use of this technology in a clinical environment, using a proper architecture and identifying a well-defined process, leads to real benefits in terms of resources optimization and quality improvement.

Advanced Business Process Management in Networked E-Business Scenarios

In the modern economy, we see a shift towards networked business scenarios. In many contemporary situations, the operation of multiple organizations is tightly coupled in collaborative business networks. To allow this tightly coupled collaboration, business process management (BPM) in these collaborative networks is becoming increasingly important. We discuss automated support for this networked BPM: automated means to manage business processes that span multiple autonomous organizations - thereby combining aspects of process management and e-business. We first provide a conceptual background for networked BPM. We describe a number of research approaches in this area, ranging from early developments to contemporary designs in a service-oriented context. This provides an overview of developments in which we observe several major trends. Firstly, we see a development from support for static business processes to support for highly dynamic processes. Secondly, we see how approaches move from addressing simple business collaboration networks to addressing complex networks. Thirdly, we find a move from the use of dedicated information technology to the use of standard technology. Finally, we observe that the BPM research efforts move through time from pushing new BPM technology into application domains to using BPM to realize business-IT alignment in application contexts.

Research of legal affair simulation based on Petri net

Legal affair simulation is on the basis of information technology, and can simulate legal scene. College students do legal experiments with virtual reality scene. This helps to train college students. Petri net has not only strict math definition to analyze the dynamic behavior of models, but also intuitive graphic expression. Petri net is used to model for legal process. Reduction rules of Petri net are used to analyze the correctness of the system. At last Java Business Process Management (JBPM) technology is used to realize legal affair simulation models, models are transformed into flow charts. Simulation software deduces processes of legal affair. Many college students have improved their ability with the software, the fact proves that the method is effective.

Toward a patient-centred and pattern-based workflow for interoperable hospital information systems

At the time, the proper management of business processes is considered among the potential points that make up the business development debate. Workflow management with service composition in a business process is one of the levers to achieve this goal by acting on the modelling techniques. The adoption of web services platform in medical field did not attain good success. For from the organisational point of view, it is a prerequisite to find a good mechanism that allows the establishment of a good correspondence between the medical activities performed and the functionalities of related web services. We proposed in this paper, the automation approach based on a medical activity reference pattern. This approach includes two interesting steps: the first is presented by automation workflow of the planning task of medical process to be performed on each patient. The second is presented by automation workflow of implementation and management of planned medical processes. We used different business process management (BPM) technologies to achieve the implementation of an intermediate layer between cooperative systems. Our proposal ensures proper organisation of cooperative work and reinforces action's traceability for each stakeholder.

Toward a patient-centred and pattern-based workflow for interoperable hospital information systems

At the time, the proper management of business processes is considered among the potential points that make up the business development debate. Workflow management with service composition in a business process is one of the levers to achieve this goal by acting on the modelling techniques. The adoption of web services platform in medical field did not attain good success. For from the organisational point of view, it is a prerequisite to find a good mechanism that allows the establishment of a good correspondence between the medical activities performed and the functionalities of related web services. We proposed in this paper, the automation approach based on a medical activity reference pattern. This approach includes two interesting steps: the first is presented by automation workflow of the planning task of medical process to be performed on each patient. The second is presented by automation workflow of implementation and management of planned medical processes. We used different business process management (BPM) technologies to achieve the implementation of an intermediate layer between cooperative systems. Our proposal ensures proper organisation of cooperative work and reinforces action's traceability for each stakeholder.

Workflow-supported social networks: Discovery, analyses, and system

Technology-supported social networks have been penetrating many aspects of our lives from friendships/blogging sites to working places. The recent BAI (business analytics and business intelligence) systems have also supported the activities of analyzing the social networking issues on employees of companies and their work-sharing relationships, and have used the analyzed issues as a sort of organizational knowledge to deliver quantum improvements in decision-makings and organizational performances. Accordingly this paper focuses on a special type of social networking knowledge called “workflow-supported social network” that is formed through the deployments and operations of workflow and BPM (business process management) technologies on a workflow-supported organization. In this paper, we formalize a theoretical framework coping with discovery phase and analysis phase, and conceive a series of formalisms and algorithms for representing, discovering, and analyzing the workflow-supported social network. As a theoretical basis, it uses the conceptual methodology of information control nets that used to formally describe workflow procedures and business processes. The theoretical framework is expansively implemented in the name of a systematic framework that is able to automatically discover a workflow-supported social network from an XPDL-based workflow package, construct SocioMatrices from the discovered workflow-supported social network, analyze the SocioMatrices, and visualize the workload centrality measures of all the actors in the corresponding workflow-supported social network. In order to verify the correctnesses of all the discovery algorithms, analysis equations, and the implemented system, we carried out two operational examples. One is for the theoretical framework, the other is for the systematic framework. We applied the theoretical framework to an information control net model of the typical enterprise Hiring workflow procedure, and presented its analyzed results and visualizations. At the same time, by the implemented system we analyzed an XPDL-based workflow package fulfilled by 17 participants, which comprises two imaginary workflow models: Hiring workflow procedure and Presentation workflow procedure consisting of 17 activities and 7 activities, respectively. The analyzed outputs are presented via a series of the captured screen-snapshots produced from the system. Finally, the paper summarizes the implications of the workflow-supported social networking knowledge and how much it is worth in improving decision-makings and organizational performances of workflow-supported organizations and enterprises.

Refactor Business Process Models with Maximized Parallelism

With the broad use of business process management technology, there are more and more business process models. Since the ability of different modelers is different, the quality of these models varies. A question arises here is that, can we refactor these models to improve the quality as practised in software engineering? Business process modeling can be regarded as declarative programming, and business process models can be used to drive the process aware information systems, which are generally developed with model driven architecture, so business process models are crucial for the efficiency of process aware information systems. In this paper, we propose a novel approach on how to systematically refactor business process models with parallel structures for sequence structures for the first time. More specifically, we analyze the real causal relations between business tasks based on data operation dependency analysis, and refactor business process models with process mining technology. After comprehensive model refactoring, parallel execution of business tasks can be maximized, so the efficiency of business processing can be improved, that is, the quality of business process models can be improved. Analysis and experiments show that our approach is effective and efficient.

Automation and orchestration framework for large-scale enterprise cloud migration

With the promise of low-cost access to flexible and elastic compute resources, enterprises are increasingly migrating their existing workloads to cloud environments. However, the heterogeneity and complexity of legacy IT infrastructure make it challenging to streamline processes of migration at an enterprise scale. In this paper, we present Cloud Migration Orchestrator (CMO), a framework for automation and coordination of large-scale cloud migration based on the IBM Business Process Management (BPM) technology with pre-migration analytics. CMO seamlessly automates complex and error-prone tasks, spanning from on-premise data center analysis, using correlations between occurrences of middleware components, to parallel migration execution by integrating various vendor migration tools. CMO offers self-service capability with a “one-click” migration execution and provides a solution for retaining IP addresses to further minimize workload remediation efforts. We present a taxonomy of network challenges, based on experience with migration of legacy environments and discuss how to automate and optimize network configurations. For each step of the migration process, starting from pre-migration assessment through the post-migration configuration, we discuss lessons learned from real-world deployments and demonstrate how the novel CMO framework reduces human activities through automation. Finally, we discuss efficiency of migration capabilities, including a fourfold process improvement (with respect to traditional approaches) using automation and orchestration.