Business Process Model and Notation

About: Business Process Model and Notation is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 9038 publications have been published within this topic receiving 190712 citations. The topic is also known as: Business Process Modeling Notation & BPMN.

A Comprehensive and Automated Approach to Intelligent Business Processes Execution Analysis

Abstract: Business process management tools have traditionally focused on supporting the modeling and automation of business processes, with the aim of enabling faster and more cost-effective process executions. As more and more processes become automated, customers become increasingly interested in managing process executions. Specifically, there is a desire for getting more visibility into process executions, to be able to quickly spot problems and areas for improvements. The idea is that, by being able to assess the process execution quality, it is possible to take actions to improve and optimize process execution, thereby leading to processes that have higher quality and lower costs. All this is possible today, but involves the execution of specialized data mining projects that typically last months, costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, and only provide a specialized, narrow solution whose applicability is often relatively short in time, due to the ever changing business and IT environments. Still, the need is such that companies undertake these efforts. To address these needs, this paper presents a set of concepts and architectures that lay the foundation for providing users with intelligent analysis and predictions about business process executions. For example, the tools are able to provide users with information about why the quality of a process execution is low, what will be the outcome of a certain process, or how many processes will be started next week. This information is crucial to gain visibility into the processes, understand or foresee problems and areas of optimization, and quickly identify solutions. Intelligent analysis and predictions are achieved by applying data mining techniques to process execution data. In contrast to traditional approaches, where lengthy projects, considerable efforts, and specialized skills in both business processes and data mining are needed to achieve these objectives, we aim at automating the entire data mining process lifecycle, so that intelligent functionality can be provided by the system while requiring little or no user input. The ambitious end goal of the work presented in this paper is that of laying the foundation for a framework and tool that is capable of providing analysts with key intelligence information about process execution, affecting crucial IT and business decisions, almost literally at the click of a button.

Preprocessing support for large scale process mining of SAP transactions

Abstract: Since ERP systems, like SAP, support the backbone operations of companies, their transaction logs provide valuable insight into the companies' business processes. In SAP every transaction is stored and linked to relevant documents, organizational structures and other process-relevant information. However, the complexities and size of SAP logs make it hard to analyze the business processes directly with current process mining tools. This paper describes an ERP log analysis system that allows the users to define at a meta level how events, resources and their inter-relations are stored and transformed for use in process mining. We show how the system is applied to extract and transform related SAP transaction data for the ProM process mining tool.

On the notion of value object

Abstract: It is increasingly recognized that business models offer an abstraction that is useful not only in the exploration of new business networks but also for the design and redesign of operational business processes. Among others, they can be used as input for a risk analysis that is crucial in cross-organizational business process design. However, the notion of value object is up till now not clearly defined. In this paper we investigate the notion of value, value objects and the activities involved when transferring value objects between business actors. We illustrate the proposed value object model by applying it on the well-known conference case.

Web Services Composition for Process Management in E-Business

Abstract: Business process management (BPM) includes the capability to discover, design, deploy, execute, interact with, operate, optimize, and analyze business processes. It is critical for businesses in the current intensive and competitive market. Traditional BPM has problems in interoperability, agility, and flexibility. This research investigates the role of Web services in process management. Web services are loosely coupled, reusable software components that semantically encapsulate discrete functionality. They provide a distributed computing technology for publishing, discovering, and consuming business services on the Internet or intranet using standard XML protocols and formats. Web services provide a way to empower business users to specify complex business functionality in a clear, building-block fashion that can be quickly modified. The paper presents the importance and benefits of using Web services for process management in e-Business. It also provides insights into various technical issues through t...

A framework for integrating business processes and business requirements

Abstract: Service-oriented architectures and Web service infrastructure provide the ideal framework for interconnecting organizations and for defining distributed business applications. The possibility to exploit business process definition and execution languages is particularly relevant for capturing the process-oriented nature of these applications. However, business processes by themselves are not enough to manage the changes and to allow an organization to continuously adapt its business model to the typical needs of distributed applications. To achieve this flexibility, it is of uttermost importance to link the business processes to the organizational strategy and to the business goals that motivate the need of these processes. We propose a framework for representing strategies and goals of an organization in terms of business requirements. The framework allows to describe how an organizational strategy is operationalized into activities and implemented by business processes. It also allows to represent the assumptions on the interactions between the different business applications. Finally, this framework allows for the usage of formal analysis techniques, in particular model checking, to pinpoint problems and to identify possible solutions in this domain.