BPM

Introduction

A business process consists of a set of activities that are performed in coordination in an organizational and technical environment. These activities jointly realize a business goal. Business process management includes concepts, methods and techniques to support design, administration, configuration, enactment and analysis of business processes. The interactions of a set of business processes are specified in a process choreography, indicating the absence of a central control. The processes communicate via messages. A workflow is the automation of (a part of) a business process, during which documents, information or tasks are passed, acording to a set of procedural rules. You should differentiate between a workflow management system from a workflow component e.g. SAP business workflow.

To define business processes you use basic building blocks:

business objects e.g. invoice
activities
resources/participants e.g. humans
triggers/events
systems
information

Activities

atomic
system activities, human interaction activities, manual activities (sheet Abstract Activity States)

Challenges of BPM

Abstraction Level
- activity atomic on business process level, but not atomic on technical level (aggregation abstraction)
- details confusing on business process level, but neccessary on technical level
- process instances -> process model -> meta model (notation e.g. BPMN, Petri) (horizontal abstraction)
- vertical abstraction (information modelling, organization modelling, IT Landscape modelling, function modelling)
Spanning of different business areas
Integration of different systems and technologies
no real time modeling (actual execution in different branches may differ from the impression of the model)
change and control for the end user

Benefits

Efficiency
- Reduce operational (process) costs
- Improve productivity
- Improve resource utilization
- Better quality/services
- bei guter Umsetzung geringere geistige Rüstzeiten (Einarbeitung in Vorgang)
Control
- Compliance
- Impact of change
- Improve visibility
Agility
- speed of change
- improve sharing

Metrics

for efficiency
- Utilization, Capacity
- Throughput, Speed
- Quality, Exceptions
for control
- organizational
- financial
- SLA failure rate
- rate-of-non-compliance
for agility
- speed

Structure of a BPM solution

(sheet WfMC Reference Architecture)

Analysis
Graphische Modellierung (detail levels for elements or levels with technical elements, tasks, roles, decisions, escalations, control flow, rules, forms, events, business objects, ...)
engineering and re-engineering between model and physical implementation
Organizational modelling (user, position, roles, organizations, business rules (e.g. seperation of duties), substitute)
Scalability
Optimization
Flexibility/Adaptability (handling of process changes, versioning, documentation)
Autonomous/Embedded
Service Repository
Integration
Reusability
Data Handling (task data, block data (subprocess), workflow data, environment data, business objects)
Escalation strategies
Exception Handling
Transaction Management
Connectivity/System Integration (vordefinierte Adapter, ...)
Security Handling
Monitoring, reporting, analysis notifications
Simulation
Life-cycle management (Versioning, process repository)
Support

Client Features

User Interfaces (Web, Mobile, Mail, ...)
input
- grouping and sorting(task, content, free columns)
- filter (criteria)
- overdues
- errors
- workitem information (state, creation time, priority, titel, ...)
- free or customized layouts
- personal customizations
- replacement persons
- searching
- attachments
- clipboard
- deposit
- drag & drop
outbox
- started workflows
- executed workitems
- forwarded workitems
reminder

Challenges/Obstacles

massive effects on daily work (early participation of users)
less human activities rise fear and defense reactions
no creativity for the users
complete modelling, otherwise no acceptance and workarounds
translation high-level business processes to workflow model, that are executable IT representations

Procedures

Strategy
- business reengineering or continous improvement
Analysis and Design
- As-Is Analysis (bottom-up or top-down) or use of reference model
- Modeling
- Validation
- Simulation
- Verification
Configuration
- Implementation
- Test
- Deployment
Controlling
- Operation
- Monitoring
- Administration
- Maintenance

Roles

Chief Process Officer
Business Process Expert
Process Participant
Business Analyst and Designer: designes the process
System Architect
Developer

Levels of Abstraction

Value Chain
Business Functions (Operations, Marketing and Sales)
Business Processes (Order Management)
private (detailed) vs. public processes (only necessary activities to understand the process choreography)
Activity
Activity Implementation

Analysis

Start
- How does the process start?
- What event triggers it?
- Is there more than one possible way it could start?

Flow
- How does the process goes from X to Y?
- How do you know X is finished?
- Does X always ends in the same way?
- How does the processor of Y knows about Y?
- Are there circumstances that Z follows after X?
- Are there any exceptional states after X?
- Are there rules that govern the transition from X to Y?

End
- What determines that the process is complete?
- Are there different end states signifying successful completion or failed or abandoned attempts?

Organizations

BPMI

In June of 2005, the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org) and the Object Management Group™ (OMG™) announced the merger of their Business Process Management (BPM) activities to provide thought leadership and industry standards for this vital and growing industry. The combined group has named itself the Business Modeling & Integration (BMI) Domain Task Force (DTF).

OASIS

Die Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) ist eine internationale, nicht-gewinnorientierte Organisation, die sich mit der Weiterentwicklung von E-Business und Web-Service Standards beschäftigt. Bekannte Standards sind OpenDocument und DocBook.

WfMC

Die Workflow-Management Coalition (WfMC) wurde 1993 gegründet und ist ein Verbund von mehr als 300 Herstellern, Nutzern, Beratern und Wissenschaftlern im Bereich des Workflow-Managements.

Standards

see http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/07/20/businessprocessmodeling.html

Notations

Standard Elements

Sequence
Parallel split
Synchronization
Exclusive choice
Simple merger (OR-join)
Multiple choice
Multiple merge
Discriminator
N out of M join
Synchronizing merge
Arbitrary circles
...

BPEL

The Business Process Execution Language (BPEL, WS-BPEL, BPEL4WS) ist eine XML-basierte Sprache zur Beschreibung von Geschäftsprozessen, deren einzelne Aktivitäten durch Webservices implementiert sind. BPEL Prozesse kommunizieren ausschließlich mit Webservices und nicht direkt mit dem Menschen. Der Standard wurd an OASIS zur Standardisierung übergeben. Aktuelles Release ist 2.0.

BPMN

EPK

C:\Uwes\Documents\Software_Development\Modeling\Business Process Modeling\Scheer_Thomas_2005_WISU_EPK.pdf
C:\Uwes\Documents\Software_Development\Modeling\Business Process Modeling\EPK.vsd

JPDL

jPDL defined by JBoss and part of JBoss BPM is an extensible XML-based process definition language, and is suitable for a range of problems, from defining web application page flow, to traditional workflow management, all the way up to orchestration of services in a SOA environment.

The jPDL suite is a download that contains all the jBPM components bundled in one easy download. The suite mainly contains:

the jBPM core library: The core workflow and BPM functionality is packaged as a simple java library. This library includes a service to manage and execute processes in the jPDL database.
the jPDL process designer: a eclipse plug-in
jBPM console web application
jBPM identity component
jBPM Job Executor

The configuration has the form like the following example:

<pageflow-definition name="numberGuess">
  <start-page name="displayGuess" view-id="/numberGuess.jsp">
     <redirect/>
     <transition name="guess" to="evaluateGuess">
       <action expression="#{numberGuess.guess}" />
     </transition>
  </start-page>
  <decision name="evaluateGuess" expression="#{numberGuess.correctGuess}">
     <transition name="true" to="win"/>
     <transition name="false" to="evaluateRemainingGuesses"/>
  </decision>
  <decision name="evaluateRemainingGuesses" expression="#{numberGuess.lastGuess}">
     <transition name="true" to="lose"/>
     <transition name="false" to="displayGuess"/>
  </decision>
  <page name="win" view-id="/win.jsp">
     <redirect/>
     <end-conversation />
  </page>
  <page name="lose" view-id="/lose.jsp">
     <redirect/>
     <end-conversation />
  </page>
</pageflow-definition>

Resources

V4 User Guide

XPDL

XML Process Definition Language is a format standardized by WFMC to interchange Business Process Definitions between different workflow products like modeling tools or workflow engines.

Patterns

http://www.workflowpatterns.com/
C:/Uwes/Documents/BPM/WorkflowPatternsBPMActivities.pdf

BPM products

JBoss jBPM

[JBoss jBPM] is a business process management engine for any Java SE or EE environment. jBPM lets you represent a business process or user interaction as a graph of nodes representing wait states, decisions, tasks, web pages, etc. The graph can be defined using a simple, very readable, XML dialect called jPDL, and may be edited and visualised graphically using an eclipse plugin, but jPDL is for jBPM just another process language.

Installation

s. here

SunGard's Infinity (formely CARNOT)

SAP Business Workflow

Operational Experiences

actual business blueprint, functional and technical specification
missing tests (extrem value, massiv load, test coverage, exception handling, timing)
missing test scenarios for repeated tests
lack of automated tests
compliance with the development and documentation guidelines
exception handling
- failure of system interfaces or downtimes
- missing or incorrect data
- missing participants
- data changed beside the workflow
- locked data,
restart enabling
consequence of system changes (data, interfaces, organizations, authorization) vs. integration technologies
error monitoring (error, waiting, ...)
load by unneccesary workflows
reorganization

Development Guidelines

namen convention
number range
uml for modelling
development test, integration tests
mapping of business activity to technical activity
implementation pattern (mail, restriction for web activities)
sub workflows (encapsulation, reuse, ...)
event queues
logging
event throwing and matching documentation

Resources

My own diagrams file:///C:\Uwes\Documents\Software_Development\Modeling\BusinessProcessModeling\BPM.vsd
Good Overview http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/07/20/businessprocessmodeling.html
Good overview to standard faults http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3385
Visio Shapes for BPMN http://www.workflowresearch.de/Downloads/BPMN/
Generelle Seite zu Prozessmodellierung http://kurze-prozesse.de/