To implement business process redesign several best practices can be distinguished. This paper gives an overview of heuristic rules that can support practitioners to develop a business process design that is a radical improvement of a current design. The emphasis is on the mechanics of the process, rather than on behavioral or change management aspects. The various best practices are derived from a wide literature survey and supplemented with experiences of the authors. To evaluate the impact of each best practice along the dimensions of cost, flexibility, time and quality, a conceptual framework is presented that synthesizes views from areas such as information systems development, enterprise modeling and workflow management. The best practices are thought to have a wide applicability across various industries and business processes. They can be used as a “check list” for process redesign under the umbrella of diverse management approaches such as Total Cycle Time compression, the Lean Enterprise and Constraints Management.

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Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics

Traditionally, process-ware information systems (PAISs) have focused on the support of predictable and repetitive business processes. Even though respective processes are suited to be fully pre-specified in a process model, flexibility is required to support dynamic process adaptations in case of exceptions. Flexibility is also needed to accommodate the need for evolving business processes and to cope with business process variability. Furthermore, PAISs are increasingly used to support less structured processes which can often be characterized as knowledgeintensive. Processes of this category are neither fully predictable nor repetitive, and therefore cannot be fully pre-specified at build-time. The (partial) unpredictability of these processes also demands a certain amount of looseness. This chapter deals with the flexibility needs of both pre-specified and loosely-specified processes and elicitates requirements for flexible process support in a PAIS. In addition, the chapter discusses PAIS features needed to accommodate flexibility needs in practice like, for example, traceability, business compliance and user support.

Enabling Flexibility in Process-Aware Information Systems

Many organizations use information technology to support various aspects of their business processes: the operational aspect, collaboration between employees, etc Workow management systems aim at supporting the operational aspect of complex business processes by using process models to automate the ordering of activities (ie, ow of work) The term `support' here relates to the ability of workow management systems to control the execution of business processes Contemporary workow management systems lack exibility, ie, the system controls in detail how employees should execute business processes While work- ow management systems deal well with predictable business processes, they are not able to handle unforeseen situations, which occur often in real-life business processes Although employees mostly have the knowledge and experience that enables them to deal with exceptional situations, they are not able to apply the right action because the system enforces the standard procedure of work This often has various undesired consequences: work is done `outside' the system, work cannot be done in the appropriate way, dissatisfaction of employees, resistance towards the system, etc As a result, workow management systems cannot be used properly if it is necessary that employees control the execution of business processes This thesis proposes a new approach to workow management systems that can facilitate contemporary business processes in a better way by enabling a better balance between exibility and support As opposed to traditional approaches which use procedural process models to explicitly (ie, step-by-step) specify the execution procedure, the proposed approach aims at the specification of business processes using constraints, ie, processes are modeled by rules that should be followed while executing business processes Constraint-based models implicitly specify the execution procedure by means of constraints: any execution that does not violate constraints is possible In addition to proposing a constrainbased approach, a concrete language for specification of constraints is given and the proof-of-concept prototype declare is described On the one hand, constraint-based management systems are exible, which allows employees to deal with specific (e/g/ unpredicted) situations in the most adequate way On the other hand, constraint-based management systems can support employees when it comes to aspects of business processes that are too complex for humans to handle There are several ways in which constraintbased management systems can provide both exibility and support

Constraint-based workflow management systems : shifting control to users

Companies increasingly adopt process management systems (PrMS) that offer promising perspectives for more flexible and efficient process execution. However, there still exist many processes in practice which are not adequately supported by contemporary PrMS. We believe that a major reason for this deficiency stems from the unsatisfactory integration of processes and data in existing PrMS. Despite emerging approaches that address this integration, a unified and comprehensive understanding of object-awareness in connection with process management is still missing. To remedy this deficiency, we extensively analyzed various processes from different domains which are not adequately supported by existing PrMS. As a major insight we learned that in many cases comprehensive process support requires object-awareness. In particular, process support has to consider object behavior as well as object interactions, and should therefore be based on two levels of granularity. Besides this, object-awareness requires data-driven process execution and integrated access to processes and data. This paper presents the basic properties of object-aware processes as well as fundamental requirements for their operational support. It further introduces our PHILharmonicFlows framework which addresses these requirements and enables object-aware process management in a comprehensive manner. Finally, we evaluate this framework along several process scenarios. We believe that a holistic approach integrating data, processes and users offers promising perspectives in order to overcome the numerous limitations of contemporary PrMS. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

PHILharmonicFlows: towards a framework for object-aware process management

In comprehensive case studies we found out that many limitations of existing Process Management Systems (PrMS) can be traced back to the unsatisfactory integration of processes and data. In this PhD project, we aim at a deep and extensive understanding of the inherent relationships between processes and data, and thus want to overcome some of the fundamental limitations known from activity-centered PrMS. Overall, we target at a comprehensive framework providing integrated
access to processes, data, and functions to its users.

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Towards a Framework for Object-aware Process Management

In manufacturing, the interaction between the design of a product and the process to manufacture this product is studied in detail. Consider, for example, material requirements planning (MRP) as part of current enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, which is mainly driven by the bill of material (BOM). For information-intensive products such as insurances, and many other services, the workflow process typically evolves or is redesigned without careful consideration of the structure and characteristics of the product. In this paper, we present a method named product-based workflow design (PBWD). PBWD takes the product specification and three design criteria as a starting point, after which formal models and techniques are used to derive a favorable new design of the workflow process. The ExSpect tool is used to support PBWD. Finally, using a real case study, we demonstrate that a full evaluation of the search space for a workflow design may be feasible depending on the chosen design criteria and the specific nature of the product specifications.

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Selma Limam

Papers

Product-Based Workflow Design