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 basic building blocks:

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

Benefits

• Efficiency
  • Reduce operational costs
  • Improve productivity
  • Improve resource utilization
  • Better quality/services
• 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
• ...

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

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

• Analysis
• Graphische Modellierung (tasks, roles, decisions, escalations, control flow, rules, forms, events, business objects, ...)
• engineering and re-engineering between model and physical implementation
• User management and business rules
• Web-Interface
• Scalability
• Adaptability
• Optimization
• Flexibility
• Integration
• Reusability
• Transaction Management
• Connectivity (vordefinierte Adapter, ...)
• Monitoring, reporting, analysis notifications
• Simulation
• Life-cycle management (Versioning, process repository)
• Support

BPM products

SunGard's Infinity (formely CARNOT)

• process modeling in Eclipse
• Shared modeling for business analysts and IT development staff
• reporting for real-time business data
• models are stored in XPDL
• models can be imported from ARIS and Income Process Designer by Get Process AG

A process definition includes

• activities (atomic piece of work)
• transitions
• diagram information
• an unique ID
• ...

Trial Version

• carnot-process-workbench.exe, the Infinity Process Workbench contains an eclipse inside

Sources

• C:\Uwes\Documents\Software_Development\Modeling\Business Process Modeling\BPM.vsd
• C:\Uwes\Documents\Software_Development\Modeling\Business Process Modeling\EPK.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
• http://www.workflowresearch.de/Downloads/BPMN/ Visio Shapes for BPMN