Business Process Modeling, Management and Mining
BPM3 Definitions
Prof. Cesare Pautasso
http://www.pautasso.info
cesare.pautasso@usi.ch
@pautasso
BPM Goals
Analyze, design, execute and re-engineer business processes
Make business processes more efficient and effective: deliver more value for less cost
Fabio Casati
Success
Successful organisations hire and reward the best people and explicitly manage and continuously improve their processes
Processes
Processes are what organisations do
Every external interaction triggers a process
Every internal action involves a process
Dysfunctional?
What is my process?
What is the goal of my process?
How do I measure my success?
How does my manager measure it?
What works? What does not work? Why?
How to improve?
You are working for a dysfunctional organization if you cannot answer these questions.
Who does what when
- Resources, People, Operators, Software Systems
- Activities, Tasks, Operations, Steps
- Processes, Coordination, Control and Data Flow
Workflow
The automation of a business process where documents, information to be processed or tasks to be carried out are passed from one participant to another following a set of procedural rules
Workflow Management Coalition, 1993
Business Process Re-Engineering
Continuous Process Improvement
Wil van der Aalst
Automation
Groupware (CSCW)
C4
People and Processes
Roles
Processes encompass one or more roles. Typical roles are hierarchically organized into companies, divisions, departments, functions.
Roles are made of users with a common characteristic: programmers, lawyers, managers, consultants, secretaries, accountants.
They identify a pool of interchangeable human resources capable of dealing with a concrete set of tasks.
Sustainability
Processes and their activities should be defined based on abstract roles
Running processes that depend on the presence and availability of specific individuals is not sustainable, nor scalable
Each process instance should have a process owner, who is responsible of its success
Flexible Processes
Flexible Workflow
How to deal with unpredictable situations?
The plan can be completed based on knowledge available only after the process has started
How to tailor the process to each customer?
The plan needs to be adjusted based on the process context and initial conditions
Modeling Processes
State-based
Activity-based
Activities correspond to state transitions of the document at the center of the process
Activities are executed as specified by the control flow of the process
References
- Fabio Casati, Business Process Management, to appear
- Mathias Weske, Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures, 2nd ed., Springer, 2012, ISBN 978-3-642-28615-5
- Marlon Dumas, Marcello La Rosa, Jan Mendling, Hajo Reijers, Fundamentals of Business Process Management, Springer, 2013,
ISBN 978-3-642-33142-8 - Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Process Mining: Discovery, Conformance and Enhancement of Business Processes, Springer, 2011,
ISBN 978-3-642-19344-6