Business Process Management Tools Research Articles

Business process runtime models: towards bridging the gap between design, enactment, and evaluation of business processes

Business process management (BPM) broadly covers a lifecycle of four distinct phases: design, configuration, enactment, and analysis and evaluation. Most BPM tool suites impose a strict separation between these phases, i.e., in each phase different languages and tools are used and the transition between phases is indirect and costly. This paper presents an environment for integrating all phases of the BPM lifecycle in which business process (BP) types and their instances can be modeled, visualized, managed and automatically synchronized, using a shared representation of models and code. The environment extends the capabilities of BP models to be used not only for specifying BPs but also for: (1) enactment—creating instance objects that capture BP operational data; (2) monitoring BP instances as they progress; (3) visualizing performance indicators of executed BPs at runtime; and (4) navigating from a BP type model to its respective instance population. As opposed to existing tools, the proposed environment does not require regenerating the workflow schema when BP designs change, nor does it require additional adaptations to support monitoring. Thereby, we facilitate a continuous and dynamic BPM environment, where workflow specifications can be changed at runtime. Our solution integrates a meta-programming language called eXecutable Modeling Facility (XMF) and the multi-perspective enterprise modeling framework (MEMO).

Challenges of Processes Simulation with Dynamic Batch Processing Activities

Business Process Management (BPM) often encompasses process improvements based on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). As a tool for estimating optimization parameters, business processes simulation can be used. Commercially available BPM tools with BPMN 2.0 accordance, have built-in simulation features which vary in the extent of supporting advanced process simulation options. In this paper, we address dynamic batch processing activities as a challenge for BPM tools with simulation features and their dynamic impact in executing activities. Further on, basic process scenarios examples were used for testing and evaluating the capabilities of selected BPM tools especially in relation to Time Driven Activity Based Costing model (TD ABC model). Closing part of the paper deals with significant limitations of BPM tools in supporting batch processing activities and the comparison to TD ABC model simulation as temporary solution for these problems.

Interoperation based Business Process Management over Crossing Social Networks

Due to the fact that people rely on social networking tools more and more in their work, it is necessary to integrate them with industrial Business Process Management (BPM) systems. Different from the widely exploited methodology by BPM system venders that furnishes social network capability to BPM suites, this paper decouples the two parts and binds them with a middle component. Such loosely coupled approach has the advantage of multiple crossing social networks and existing BPM tools can all be adhered together, which means great flexibility and working convenience. The method also enables people to seamlessly incorporate their work with frequently used public social networking tools (e.g. Facebook, twitter, Instagram, Weibo, etc.). At the end, the paper presents a prototype implementation of this method.

Smart Business Process Management over Social Networks: Mechanism and Implementation

Business Process Management (BPM) has gained great success in business and industry. However, business processes and workflow has been greatly changed by the emergence of social network media in recent years. It is necessary to study a mechanism of the seamless integration of BPM tools with existing social network platforms. This paper aims at building a social BPM system at the minimum cost on multiple existing popular public social networks. An integrated social BPM mechanism is proposed and implemented through abstract social network definition, abstract definition of BPM with Event-Driven Process Chains (EPC) model and open platforms of the social networks. The mechanism has the merits of stand-alone design, seamless integration and crossing platforms. Under the support of the mechanism people achieve seamless collaboration on public social networks.

Business process management as the “Killer App” for Petri nets

Since their inception in 1962, Petri nets have been used in a wide variety of application domains. Although Petri nets are graphical and easy to understand, they have formal semantics and allow for analysis techniques ranging from model checking and structural analysis to process mining and performance analysis. Over time Petri nets emerged as a solid foundation for Business Process Management (BPM) research. The BPM discipline develops methods, techniques, and tools to support the design, enactment, management, and analysis of operational business processes. Mainstream business process modeling notations and workflow management systems are using token-based semantics borrowed from Petri nets. Moreover, state-of-the-art BPM analysis techniques are using Petri nets as an internal representation. Users of BPM methods and tools are often not aware of this. This paper aims to unveil the seminal role of Petri nets in BPM.

Design science in action: developing a modeling technique for eliciting requirements on business process management (BPM) tools

Selecting a suitable business process management (BPM) tool to build a business process support system for a particular business process is difficult. There are a number of BPM tools on the market that are available as systems to install locally and as services in the cloud. These tools are based on different BPM paradigms (e.g., workflow or case management) and provide different capabilities (e.g., enforcement of the control flow, shared spaces, or a collaborative environment). This makes it difficult for an organization to select a tool that would fit the business processes at hand. The paper suggests a solution for this problem. The core of the solution is a modeling technique for business processes for eliciting their requirements for a suitable BPM tool. It produces a high-level, business process model, called a "step-relationship" model that depicts the essential characteristics of a process in a paradigm-independent way. The solution presented in this paper has been developed based on the paradigm of design science research, and the paper discusses the research project from the design science perspective. The solution has been applied in two case studies in order to demonstrate its feasibility.

Managing Processes for Virtual Teams – A BPM Approach

Managing processes in a virtual organization context it's a new challenge. This paper will present a BPM (Business Process Management) approach for implementing processes in virtual organizations, having as case study a virtual team working in Software Development Industry. The work processes are defined using BPMN (Business Process Model and Notation) standard and are designed and simulated using a BPM tool. Metrics are gathered for controlling the processes. This case study will prove the importance of having well defined-processes and will highlight the key aspects for implementing processes in virtual teams, with the support of BPM methodologies and tools.

Simplifying process model abstraction: Techniques for generating model names

The increased adoption of business process management approaches, tools, and practices has led organizations to accumulate large collections of business process models. These collections can easily include from a hundred to a thousand models, especially in the context of multinational corporations or as a result of organizational mergers and acquisitions. A concrete problem is thus how to maintain these large repositories in such a way that their complexity does not hamper their practical usefulness as a means to describe and communicate business operations. This paper proposes a technique to automatically infer suitable names for business process models and fragments thereof. This technique is useful for model abstraction scenarios, as for instance when user-specific views of a repository are required, or as part of a refactoring initiative aimed to simplify the repository's complexity. The technique is grounded in an adaptation of the theory of meaning to the realm of business process models. We implemented the technique in a prototype tool and conducted an extensive evaluation using three process model collections from practice and a case study involving process modelers with different experience.

From business process models to hierarchical task network planning domains

AbstractHierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning paradigm has been widely used during the last decade to model and solve planning and scheduling (P&S) problems, and it has proved to be very useful in the planning and coordination of human tasks. At the same time, Business Process Management (BPM) tools are being increasingly used in the modeling of organizations’ business practices and processes, but their life cycle has shown to have some shortages (as the possibility to obtain context-dependent plan instances). In this paper we present a methodology and software framework to translate Business Process Models into HTN P&S domains, in order to cover some of these deficiencies.

Automated generation of patient-tailored electronic care pathways by translating computer-interpretable guidelines into hierarchical task networks

This paper describes a methodology which enables computer-aided support for the planning, visualization and execution of personalized patient treatments in a specific healthcare process, taking into account complex temporal constraints and the allocation of institutional resources. To this end, a translation from a time-annotated computer-interpretable guideline (CIG) model of a clinical protocol into a temporal hierarchical task network (HTN) planning domain is presented. The proposed method uses a knowledge-driven reasoning process to translate knowledge previously described in a CIG into a corresponding HTN Planning and Scheduling domain, taking advantage of HTNs known ability to (i) dynamically cope with temporal and resource constraints, and (ii) automatically generate customized plans. The proposed method, focusing on the representation of temporal knowledge and based on the identification of workflow and temporal patterns in a CIG, makes it possible to automatically generate time-annotated and resource-based care pathways tailored to the needs of any possible patient profile. The proposed translation is illustrated through a case study based on a 70 pages long clinical protocol to manage Hodgkin's disease, developed by the Spanish Society of Pediatric Oncology. We show that an HTN planning domain can be generated from the corresponding specification of the protocol in the Asbru language, providing a running example of this translation. Furthermore, the correctness of the translation is checked and also the management of ten different types of temporal patterns represented in the protocol. By interpreting the automatically generated domain with a state-of-art HTN planner, a time-annotated care pathway is automatically obtained, customized for the patient's and institutional needs. The generated care pathway can then be used by clinicians to plan and manage the patients long-term care. The described methodology makes it possible to automatically generate patient-tailored care pathways, leveraging an incremental knowledge-driven engineering process that starts from the expert knowledge of medical professionals. The presented approach makes the most of the strengths inherent in both CIG languages and HTN planning and scheduling techniques: for the former, knowledge acquisition and representation of the original clinical protocol, and for the latter, knowledge reasoning capabilities and an ability to deal with complex temporal and resource constraints. Moreover, the proposed approach provides immediate access to technologies such as business process management (BPM) tools, which are increasingly being used to support healthcare processes.

The Effectiveness of ISO 9000 in an Emerging Market as a Business Process Management Tool: The Case of the UAE

The popularity of the ISO 9000 standard initiated so may points of views for researchers and organizations implementing ISO 9000 for whether the standard that utilizes business process management approach had fulfilled its scope and helped companies in initiating an effective quality management system or not in an emerging market?. The literature review highlighted the richness in studies and researchers in different parts of the world addressing the ISO 9000 standard implementation and other factors affecting it are not having the same weight in the Arab World in general and the United Arab Emirates UAE in particular as an emerging market country, despite the fact that the UAE is occupying the second place in term of the number of certified organizations in the Arab world. From this point, it is clear that it is a need to have an exploratory study to evaluate ISO 9OOO implementation within the UAE organizations to determine the effectiveness of the standard based on the usage as a business process approach or a tool. More specifically, the research intended to cover areas such as drivers for adopting the standard, benefits of the standard, and problems witnessed during implementation. In achieving the objectives of the study, a quantitative study in nature were undertaken through a sample of 100 certified firms in the UAE with a feedback of 51% was obtained. Initial findings indicate that organizations which implemented the standard indicated that they had a positive impact and it seen as a good starting point to continue with such business process management tools/systems in sustaining business.

Partial process models to manage business process variants

Today’s process aware information systems deal often with the problem of variants. Management of process model variants that addresses issues such as consistency between process variants, uncontrolled redundancy, huge modelling efforts, etc. is not adequately supported by current business process management (BPM) tools. This paper presents an approach to address the issues of providing consistent mechanisms for managing process variants and reducing the redundancy in order to achieve a more efficient business process modelling task. Our approach, partial process models (PPMs), is a query-based approach which maintains the link between the variant process models by means of process model views. These views are defined using BPMN-Q, and these views employ a software engineering like inheritance methodology. Thus, dynamic evaluation for the defined queries of the process views guarantees that the process modeller is able to get up-to-date and consistent status of the process model.

Business process management: a missing link in business education

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to analyse the inadequacies of current business education in the context of “process”. It presents an analysis of the background to business processes in historical perspective and posits the significance of business management for today's business education. It argues the importance of business processes and business process management (BPM) in the context of the current and emerging information technologies (IT) and business education and highlights its ability to offer a missing link between business, IT and strategy.Design/methodology/approachThe approach involves analysis and review of the literature and analysis of secondary data.FindingsEven though business processes have been the subject of formal study from multiple perspectives for a long time, since the start of industrial age, processes still are not well understood, left unmanaged and poorly executed. With business schools teaching primarily function specific and narrow and IT schools focused on narrow technical skills, learning and understanding “process view” and “integration” is left to the individual student or academic, this study observes. It posits the significance of BPM and highlights its ability to provide the missing link to business education. It reports on the strategies employed by business schools and discusses the challenges in BPM education.Research limitations/implicationsRecognising the importance of BPM by business schools and embedding the BPM concepts and tools in a unified integrated curriculum across the business school with an inter‐disciplinary focus is challenging for business schools. Further studies, investigating how practitioners perceive this gap and on the effectiveness of different strategies of teaching BPM, are important.Practical implicationsThese findings will help practitioners in understanding the gap between university education and practice and to develop appropriate training and development strategies.Originality/valueThe paper provides an analysis of the concept of “process” from an historical perspective and posits BPM as a missing link in business education that delivers “integration” and “process orientation” to business students.

Investigating the effort of using business process management technology: Results from a controlled experiment

Business Process Management (BPM) technology has become an important instrument for supporting complex coordination scenarios and for improving business process performance. When considering its use, however, enterprises typically have to rely on vendor promises or qualitative reports. What is still missing and what is demanded by IT decision makers are quantitative evaluations based on empirical and experimental research. This paper picks up this demand and illustrates how experimental research can be applied to technologies enabling enterprises to coordinate their business processes and to associate them with related artifacts and resources. The conducted experiment compares the effort for implementing and maintaining a sample business process either based on standard workflow technology or on a case handling system. We motivate and describe the experimental design, discuss threats for the validity of our experimental results (as well as risk mitigations), and present the results of our experiment. In general, more experimental research is needed in order to obtain valid data on the various aspects and effects of BPM technology and BPM tools.

Business process management with the user requirements notation

A number of recent initiatives in both academia and industry have sought to achieve improvements in e-businesses through the utilization of Business Process Management (BPM) methodologies and tools...

Business process perspectives: Theoretical developments vs. real-world practice

Business processes have been discussed for more than a decade now. However, there are not as of yet comprehensive and substantial benefits that can justify the hype around the concept. This paper contrasts and summarises the main findings of literature research and a targeted survey conducted within the service industry in order to investigate the current state of research and practice regarding key aspects of business processes. The survey involved the participation of 25 respondents working in service industry sectors such as finance, public sector and consultancy. The paper demonstrates that although theoretical developments are dealing with sophisticated issues around business processes, the service industry is reluctant to adopt a similar perspective and still uses simple and manual techniques in dealing with business processes. The main reason is that the service industry is not convinced that a business process approach could bring significant tangible and measurable benefits. This is due to the fact that there is no comprehensive and systematic solution proposed in terms of a fully functional business process software suite. The requirements for an integrated business process management tool include some of the paper's findings.

Comparison and evaluation of business process modelling and management tools

Business Process Modelling (BPM) and management are becoming an essential part of today's enterprises. This paper compares and evaluates several BPM tools against the criteria that are critical to an enterprise's business process optimisation, and its adoption of emerging technologies and methodologies – including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Architectures (EAs).

Innovation through Information Technology (IT) enabled Business Process Management (BPM): a review of key issues

This paper presents an holistic review of Business Process Management (BPM). It reviews the definitions of BPM, its philosophies, principles and benefits. It then conceptualises the major role of Information Technology (IT) in BPM, and reviews BPM relationship with strategic management and organisational structure. Finally, the paper discusses BPM tools, and BPM-related approaches such as process reengineering and benchmarking.

A Comprehensive and Automated Approach to Intelligent Business Processes Execution Analysis

Business process management tools have traditionally focused on supporting the modeling and automation of business processes, with the aim of enabling faster and more cost-effective process executi...

Ein Geschäftsprozessmanagement-Werkzeug der nächsten Generation — ADONIS: Konzeption und Anwendungen

At present, state-of-the-art business process management tools usually offer hard-coded methods, that are only partially adaptable. Tools based on metamodeling concepts are bere named next-generation tools, The paper describes the potential of these tools by taking ADONIS as an exam ple. Based on the explanation of the ADONIS concepts three application areas and its corresponding methods are presented: The integrated management of products and busi ness processes, the development of workflow applications and the model-based configura tion of standard software.