BPM

Introduction

A business process is a sequence of activities that is required to perform tasks on an economically relevant object. Workflow management automates business processes. To define business processes you use 4 basic building blocks:

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

Benefits

• Efficiency
  • Reduce operational costs
  • Improve productivity
  • Improve resource utilization
  • Better quality
• 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

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).

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
• ...

BPMN

The Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is a standardized graphical notation for drawing business processes in a workflow. BPMN was developed by Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), and is now being maintained by the Object Management Group since the two organizations merged in 2005. Its current adopted version is 1.1 and the proposed one is 2.0. Die BPMN wurde 2002 durch Stephen A. White, Mitarbeiter von IBM, erarbeitet und durch die Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI), einer Organisation, die Standards im Bereich Geschäftsprozessmodellierung definiert hatte, veröffentlicht. Diagramme in der BPMN heißen Business Process Diagram (BPD).

• http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Process_Modeling_Notation Wikipedia BPMN

EPK

• C:\Uwes\Documents\BPM\Scheer_Thomas_2005_WISU_EPK.pdf

XPDL

XML Process Definition Language is a format standardized by the Workflow Management Coalition 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

Features of a BPM solution

• Graphische Modellierung
• Web-Interface
• Scalability
• Adaptability
• Flexibility
• Integration
• Reusability
• Transaction Management
• vordefinierte Adapter
• Monitoring und Management
• Simulation
• Support

Sources

• C:\Uwes\VisioDiagrams\Workflw.vsd
• http://www.onjava.com/pub/a/onjava/2005/07/20/businessprocessmodeling.html Good Overview
• http://www.bcs.org/server.php?show=ConWebDoc.3385 Good overview to standard faults