Business Process Management
a ‘‘business process’’ consists of a set of activities that are performed in coordination in an organization and technical environment
- these process jointly implement some ‘‘business goal’’
- (Weske, 2007)
Motivation:
- Enterprise System Architecture - why BPM systems are needed
Example: IT4BI
Consider a process of IT4BI admission
Activities:
- Receive an application
- Assign an identifier
- Evaluate an application
- Request for more information
- Select candidates
- Communicate the results
- Send rankings to the European Commission
- Send invitations - for visas
- Admission to the University
- and many others
This is a business process
BPM: Managing Business Processes
How to model BPs?
- Petri Nets and Workflow Nets - basis, originally for modeling concurrent systems
- YAWL - academic
- BPMN - the de-facto standard
BPM Lifecycle
BPM is more than just modeling:
- Process Mining - to discover existing processes in a company
- Process Analysis - in the model correct or not, is the process consistent with the model? (see Process Conformance)
- Process Enacting - putting a model into software
- Process Monitoring - how much time each task takes?
- Process Simulation - after creating a model we try to see what would happen if we used it
$(1) \to (2) \to (3) \to (4) \to (1)$
- is a BPM lifecycle
Process Mining
Process Mining is about discovering the existent process and creating a model from it
There are several process mining algorithms. For example,
- Alpha Algorithm
- Genetic Process Miner
- and others