Business Process Management

Companies have been striving to improve their business processes for decades, but, in the past few years, the emergence of a variety of new software technologies and the relentless competitive pressures on large companies to outsource and to develop a worldwide presence has taken the interest in business processes to a new level of intensity. In this talk we consider some of the roots of today’s interest in business process management (BPM), the growing resources available to those who want to undertake business process change, the emerging BPM systems that seem destined to transform businesses in the next decade, and the implications this transformation will have for those who work in the new generation of processoriented organizations.

This presentation will explore how BPM research can seamlessly combine the academic requirement of rigor with the aim to impact the practice of Business Process Management. After a brief introduction into the research agendas as they are perceived by different BPM communities, two research projects will be discussed that illustrate how empirically-informed quantitative and qualitative research, combined with design science, can lead to outcomes that BPM practitioners are willing to adopt. The first project studies the practice of process modeling using Information Systems theory, and demonstrates how a better understanding of this practice can inform the design of modeling notations and methods. The second project studies the adoption of process management within organizations, and leads to models of how organizations can incrementally transition to greater levels of BPM maturity. The presentation will conclude with recommendations for how the BPM research and practitioner communities can increasingly benefit from each other.

Although the business process community has put a major emphasis on patterns, notably the famous workflow patterns, only limited support for using patterns in today’s business process modeling tools can be found. While the basic workflow patterns for control flow are available in almost every business process modeling tool, there is no support for the user in correctly applying these simple patterns leading to many incorrectly modeled business processes. Only limited support for pattern compounds can be found in some tools, there is no active support for selecting patterns that are applicable in some user-determined context, tools do not give feedback to the user if applying a pattern can lead to a modeling error, nor do they trace the sequence of applied patterns during the editing process.

In this paper, we describe an extension of a business process modeling tool with patterns to provide these capabilities. We distinguish three scenarios of pattern application and discuss a set of pattern compounds that are based on the basic workflow patterns for control flow. We present an approach where business users receive help in understanding the context and consequences of applying a pattern.

The use of subprocesses in large process models is an important step in modeling practice to handle complexity. While there are several advantages attributed to such a modular design, including ease of reuse, scalability, and enhanced understanding, the lack of precise guidelines turns out to be a major impediment for applying modularity in a systematic way. In this paper we approach this area of research from a critical perspective. Our first contribution is a review of existing approaches to process model modularity. This review shows that aside from some limited insights, a systematic and grounded approach to finding the optimal modularization of a process model is missing. Therefore, we turned to modular process models from practice to study their merits. In particular, we set up an experiment involving professional process modelers and tested the effect of modularization on understanding. Our second contribution, stemming from this experiment, is that modularity appears to pay off. We discuss some of the limitations of our research and implications for future design-oriented approaches.

This report details the experience made using BPMN as the process modeling notation for a large-scale modeling effort that formed the heart of a business transformation project. It illustrates the practical limitations encountered in using BPMN and how they were overcome by using UML to extend BPMN. The automated document generation approach used to generate user-friendly process documentation from the BPMN model and the instruments used to drive the business transformation project forward are explained.

In today’s fast changing business environment flexible Process Aware Information Systems (PAISs) are required to allow companies to rapidly adjust their business processes to changes in the environment. However, increasing flexibility in large PAISs usually leads to less guidance for its users and consequently requires more experienced users. To allow for flexible systems with a high degree of support, intelligent user assistance is required. In this paper we propose a recommendation service, which, when used in combination with flexible PAISs, can support end users during process execution by giving recommendations on possible next steps. Recommendations are generated based on similar past process executions by considering the specific optimization goals. In this paper we also evaluate the proposed recommendation service, by means of experiments.

Process-aware information systems ranging from generic workflow systems to dedicated enterprise information systems use

work lists

to offer so-called

work items

to users. The work list handlers typically show a sorted list of work items comparable to the way that e-mails are presented in most e-mail programs. Since the work list handler is the dominant interface between the system and its users, it is worthwhile to provide a more advanced graphical interface that uses context information about work items and users. This paper uses the “map metaphor” to visualise work items and resources (e.g., users) in a sophisticated manner. Moreover, based on “distance notions” work items are visualised differently. For example, urgent work items of a type that suits the user are highlighted. The underlying map and distance notions may be of a geographical nature (e.g., a map of a city of office building), but may also be based on the process design, organisational structures, social networks, due dates, calenders, etc. The approach presented in this paper is supported by a visualisation framework implemented in the context of YAWL. The framework is set up in such a way that it can easily be combined with other workflow systems.

The need to involve business users in process modeling is largely perceived in the context of Business Process Management systems. This can facilitate the elaboration of consistent process models which are better turned to users’ needs and organizational changes. Despite the variety of tools and notations, process modeling remains hardly accessible for business users, who lack advanced technical skills. This paper presents an integrated approach for end-user driven business process modeling which uses web service based activity tracking to generate weakly-structured process models by capturing data on personal task management. These models can be adapted and reused for ad-hoc process support or exported to formal workflows by delivering the business knowledge to process designers and software developers. Interconnection of ad-hoc and formal workflows results in enhanced process flexibility and allows complementation of formal workflows through deviations at runtime. The approach is validated through the Collaborative Task Management (CTM) prototype.

We consider workflow graphs as a model for the control flow of a business process model and study the problem of

workflow graph parsing

, i.e., finding the structure of a workflow graph. More precisely, we want to find a decomposition of a workflow graph into a hierarchy of sub-workflows that are subgraphs with a single entry and a single exit of control. Such a decomposition is the crucial step, for example, to translate a process modeled in a graph-based language such as BPMN into a process modeled in a block-based language such as BPEL. For this and other applications, it is desirable that the decomposition be unique,

modular

and as fine as possible, where

modular

means that a local change of the workflow graph can only cause a local change of the decomposition. In this paper, we provide a decomposition that is unique, modular and finer than in previous work. It is based on and extends similar work for sequential programs by Tarjan and Valdes [11]. We show that our decomposition can be computed in linear time based on an algorithm by Hopcroft and Tarjan [3] that finds the triconnected components of a biconnected graph.

We present a finite representation of all services

M

where the composition with a given service

N

is deadlock-free, and a given set of activities of

N

can be

covered

(i.e. is not dead). Our representation is an extension of the existing notion of an operating guideline which only cared about deadlock freedom. We further present an algorithm to decide whether a service

M

matches with the extended operating guideline of

N

.

Many work has been conducted to analyze service choreographies to assert manyfold correctness criteria. While errors can be

detected

automatically, the

correction

of defective services is usually done manually. This paper introduces a graph-based approach to calculate the minimal edit distance between a given defective service and synthesized correct services. This edit distance helps to automatically fix found errors while keeping the rest of the service untouched. A prototypic implementation shows that the approach is applicable to real-life services.

Object-centric approaches for business process implementation distribute process logic among several interacting components, each representing a life cycle of an object. One of the challenges is to manage the component coupling, because highly-coupled components are difficult to distribute, maintain and adapt. Existing techniques that derive a component for each object that changes state in a given process do not consider component interdependencies and run the risk of producing components that are highly coupled. To make coupling explicit and manageable during component identification, we propose an approach for computing the expected coupling of an object-centric implementation for a given process model prior to actually deriving this implementation.

Although several process modeling languages allow one to specify processes with multiple start elements, the precise semantics of such models are often unclear, both from a pragmatic and from a theoretical point of view. This paper addresses the lack of research on this problem and introduces the CASU framework. The contribution of this framework is a systematic description of design alternatives for the specification of instantiation semantics of process modeling languages. We classify six of the most prominent languages by the help of this framework. Our work provides the basis for the design of new correctness criteria as well as for the formalization of EPCs and extension of BPMN. It complements research such as the workflow patterns.

In scientific workflow systems, temporal consistency is critical to ensure the timely completion of workflow instances. To monitor and guarantee the correctness of temporal consistency, temporal constraints are often set and then verified. However, most current work adopts user specified temporal constraints without considering system performance, and hence may result in frequent temporal violations that deteriorate the overall workflow execution effectiveness. In this paper, with a systematic analysis of such problem, we propose a probabilistic strategy which is capable of setting coarse-grained and fine-grained temporal constraints based on the weighted joint distribution of activity durations. The strategy aims to effectively assign a set of temporal constraints which are well balanced between user requirements and system performance. The effectiveness of our work is demonstrated by an example scientific workflow in our scientific workflow system.

Simulation is widely used as a tool for analyzing business processes but is mostly focused on examining rather abstract steady-state situations. Such analyses are helpful for the initial design of a business process but are less suitable for operational decision making and continuous improvement. Here we describe a

simulation system for operational decision support

in the context of workflow management. To do this we exploit not only the workflow’s

design

, but also logged data describing the system’s observed

historic

behavior, and information extracted about the current

state

of the workflow. Making use of actual data capturing the current state and historic information allows our simulations to accurately predict potential near-future behaviors for different scenarios. The approach is supported by a practical toolset which combines and extends the workflow management system YAWL and the process mining framework ProM.

Business Continuity Management (BCM) is a process to manage risks, emergencies, and recovery plans of an organization during a crisis. It results in a document called Business Continuity Plans (BCP) that specifies the methodology and procedures required to backup and recover the functional unit of a disrupted business. Traditionally, the BCP assessment is based only on the continuity of IS infrastructures and does not consider possible relations with the business objectives and business processes. This traditional approach assumes that the risk of business continuity is resulted from the disruption of the IS infrastructures. However, we believe there are situations where the risk emerges even the infrastructures up and running. Moreover, the lack of modeling framework and the aided-tool make the process even harder.

In this paper, we propose a framework to support modeling and analysis of BCP from the organization perspective, where risks and treatments are modeled and analyzed along strategic objectives and their realizations. An automated reasoner based on cost-benefit analysis techniques is proposed to elicit and then adopt the most cost-efficient plan. The approach is developed using the Tropos Goal-Risk Framework and the Time Dependency and Recovery Model as underlain frameworks. A Loan Originating Process case study is used as a running example to illustrate the proposal.

Resource management has been recognised as an important topic for the execution of business processes since long time ago. Yet, most exiting works on resource allocation have not paid enough attentions to process characteristics, such as structural and task dependencies. Furthermore, no effort has been made on optimising resource allocation by improving business processes. To address this issue, we propose an approach that optimises the use of resources in an enterprise by exploring the structural features of a business process and adapting the structures of the business process to better fit the resources available in the enterprise. After a motivating example, we describe a role-based business process model for resource allocation. Then we present strategies for resource allocation optimisation and discuss the relationship between resource allocation and business process improvement. A set of heuristic rules are discussed and algorithms based on these rules are designed for optimising resource allocation with a particular optimisation goal.

Business-driven development favors the construction of process models at different abstraction levels and by different people. As a consequence, there is a demand for consolidating different versions of process models by detecting and resolving differences. Existing approaches rely on the existence of a change log which logs the changes when changing a process model. However, in several scenarios such a change log does not exist and differences must be identified by comparing process models before and after changes have been made. In this paper, we present our approach to detecting and resolving differences between process models, in the absence of a change log. It is based on computing differences and deriving change operations for resolving differences, thereby providing a foundation for variant and version management in these cases.

This paper presents a technique to diagnose differences between business process models in the EPC notation. The diagnosis returns the exact position of a difference in the business process models and diagnoses the type of a difference, using a typology of differences developed in previous work. This in contrast to existing techniques for detecting process differences (by showing non-equivalence), which return simple true/false statements, or statements in terms of a formal semantics. Neither type of statement is helpful to a business analyst not versed in formal semantics. A case study illustrates the usefulness of the technique. It also shows that, although the technique has exponential complexity, it can be used in practice, because of repeated scoping of the models. The technique can be used, for example, to resolve differences between operational process in a merger between organizations.

Novel trends in Web services technology challenge the assumptions made by current standards for process-based service composition. Most RESTful Web service APIs, which do not rely on the Web service description language (WSDL), cannot easily be composed using the BPEL language. In this paper we propose a lightweight BPEL extension to natively support the composition of RESTful Web services using business processes. We also discuss how to expose the execution state of a business process so that it can be manipulated through REST primitives in a controlled way.

The modelling of B2B scenarios focuses on conversations between key partners to establish a common business context for their collaboration. With the prevalence of Web services, attention has turned to service choreographies as a means of message exchange ordering between collaborating participants, from a global (or shared) understanding. As such, the message ordering in a choreography model can then be used to determine the message ordering behaviour of each participant’s process. In this paper, we extend the suitability of choreography modelling for the early phase of analysis, where the participants and the nature of interactions develops under the flux of requirements acquisition. In particular, we develop a structural view of interactions and stepwise refinement, leading to behavioural considerations, reminiscent of classical techniques. In addition, we introduce contextualisation of intent behind message exchanges in the form of speech acts. This, we show, can be used to automatically detect conflicts in conversations, in the business sense, namely negotiation or provision breakdowns - prior to technical implementations of choreographies. Model abstraction and refinement is based on Semantic Object Model (SOM), and a mapping to the Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) is shown.

Today, most business processes are at least partially supported by IT systems. An integration of those IT systems is required, because a business process usually involves several IT systems. The OrViA framework suggests a model-driven approach to solve this integration problem. Platform independent business processes are modelled and transformed into executable ones. To ensure compliance to internal and external policies, the OrViA framework suggests using model checking technologies.

We present an industrial case study evaluating the OrViA framework in context of a model-driven SOA implementation in the E-Government domain. We were able to successfully apply the OrViA framework, but we also identified several problems. Our case study shows how model-driven approaches can be successfully applied in real-world projects.

Compliance rules describe regulations, policies and quality constraints business processes must adhere to. Given the large number of rules and their frequency of change, manual compliance checking can become a time-consuming task. Automated compliance checking of process activities and their ordering is an alternative whenever business processes and compliance rules are described in a formal way. This paper introduces an approach for automated compliance checking. Compliance rules are translated into temporal logic formulae that serve as input to model checkers which in turn verify whether a process model satisfies the requested compliance rule. To address the problem of state-space explosion we employ a set of reduction rules. The approach is prototypically realized and evaluated.

Many end users will expect the output of process mining to be a model they can easily understand. On the other hand, knowing which objects were accessed in each operation can be a valuable input for process discovery. From these two trends it is possible to establish an analogy between process mining and the discovery of program structure. In this paper we present an approach for extracting process control-flow from a trace of read and write operations over a set of objects. The approach is divided in two independent phases. In the first phase, Fourier analysis is used to identify periodic behavior that can be represented with loop constructs. In the second phase, a match-and-merge technique is used to produce a control-flow graph capable of generating the input trace and thus representing the process that generated it. The combination of these techniques provides a structured and compact representation of the unknown process, with very good results in terms of conformance metrics.

The paper presents a new method for the synthesis of Petri nets from event logs in the area of Process Mining. The method derives a bounded Petri net that over-approximates the behavior of an event log. The most important property is that it produces a net with the smallest behavior that still contains the behavior of the event log. The methods described in this paper have been implemented in a tool and tested on a set of examples.

In a service-oriented architecture, software services interact by means of message exchanges that follow certain patterns documented in the form of behavioural interfaces. As any software artifact, a service interface evolves over time. When this happens, incompatibility problems may arise. We demonstrate a tool, namely

BESERIAL

, that can pinpoint incompatibilities between behavioural interfaces.

Business transformation is a key management initiative that attempts to align people, business process and technology of an enterprise more closely with its business strategy and vision. It is an essential part of the competitive business cycle. Existing consulting methods and tools do not address issues such as scalability of methodology, knowledge management, asset reuse, and governance well, to name a few. This paper presents Business Transformation Workbench, a practitioner’s tool for business transformation addressing these problems. It implements a methodical approach that was devised to analyze business transformation opportunities and make business cases for transformation initiatives and thereby offering decision-support to the consultants. It provides an intuitive way to evaluate and understand various opportunities in staff and IT consolidation and process standardization. It embodies structured analytical models, both qualitative and quantitative, to enhance the consultants’ practices. BT Workbench has been instantiated with data from finance management domain and applied to address a client situation as a case study. An alpha testing of the tool was conducted with about dozen practitioners. 90% of the consultants who tested the BT Workbench tool felt that the tool would help them do a better job during a client engagement.

In the academic business process management community, tooling plays an increasingly important role [8,6]. There are good reasons for this fact. Firstly, theoretical concepts benefit from exploration using prototypical implementation of the concepts. By experimentation based on real-world business processes, concepts can be evaluated and refined. Secondly, the practical applicability of the research work can be demonstrated, which is important to raise awareness of academic BPM research to practitioners.

While the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is the de facto standard for modeling business processes on a conceptual level, YAWL allows the specification of executable workflow models. A transformation between these two languages enables the integration of different levels of abstraction in process modeling. This paper discusses the transformation of BPMN diagrams to YAWL nets and presents a tool that carries out this transformation.

This demonstration paper describes the Living Systems Autonomic BPM (LS/ABPM) suite from Whitestein Technologies AG. This unique product consists of several integrated components for modelling, executing and administering business processes using a ground-breaking

goal

 − 

oriented

approach to BPM. A real and current customer case in the domain of Engineering Change Management (ECM), from Daimler AG, is used to explore the approach and features of the suite in the demonstration. Key improvements over conventional BPM techniques and technologies include business-goal oriented process modeling and extending process agility beyond the design stage by offering autonomic, selfoptimizing process orchestration and execution.

Industry is increasingly demanding IT support for large engineering process structures consisting of hundreds up to thousands of synchronized processes. In technical domains, such process structures are characterized by their strong relation to the assembly of a product (e.g., a car); i.e., resulting process structures are

data-driven

. The strong linkage between data and processes can be utilized for automatically creating process structures as well as for (dynamically) adapting them at a high level of abstraction. This paper presents the COREPRO

Sim

demonstrator which enables sophisticated support for modeling, coordinating and (dynamically) adapting data-driven process structures. COREPRO

Sim

substantiates the COREPRO approach which provides a new paradigm for the integration of complex data and process structures.