Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Business Process Management (BPM) remains of high popularity as a paradigm for the evaluation and design of organizational and IT systems as well as an increasingly attractive domain for academic research. There are definite signs of maturity in the operationalization and value generation of process-based management approaches and communities of practice (e.g., BPMG.org), and events like the annual Business Process Management conference contribute to a fast growing body of knowledge on BPM.

The sequence and timing constraints on the activities in business processes are an important aspect of business process compliance. To date, these constraints are most often implicitly transcribed into control-flow-based process models. This implicit representation of constraints, however, complicates the verification, validation and reuse in business process design. In this paper, we investigate the use of temporal deontic assignments on activities as a means to declaratively capture the control-flow semantics that reside in business regulations and business policies. In particular, we introduce PENELOPE, a language to express temporal rules about the obligations and permissions in a business interaction, and an algorithm to generate compliant sequence-flow-based process models that can be used in business process design.

Organizations are often faced with managing a variety of processes. These range from predefined to emergent. There has been very little work on supporting emergent processes many of which are founded on collaboration between process workers. A variety of technologies are available to support collaboration. However, people in most business processes still use the basic technologies such as e-mail or intranet information portals and do not fully realize the advantages provided by emerging technologies. This paper describes a method for extending collaboration beyond simple exchanges and into collaborative work process support.

There is a growing focus on achieving competitive advantage through the dynamic reconfiguration of the value chain. It is advocated that as a result of conceptual and technology convergence, BPM is now ready to be the enabler of this dynamic reconfiguration capability. Business processing is increasing in complexity. It is proposed that there are two dimensions to complexity: breadth complexity (the range of activity types within a process) and depth complexity (the abstraction levels of process logic within a process). Current process design strategies tend to specialise in specific breadth/depth complexity combinations. Given individual processes can span multiple breadth/depth segments, this specialisation strategy can result in multiple process design strategies and toolsets within the one process. This will prevent true business process dynamic reconfiguration. A number of conceptual and technology developments need to be further evaluated with the objective being an integrated consistent process design strategy across all breadth and depth complexity segments.

Reference models capture best-practice solutions for a specific industry such as retail, banking, or insurance. The models usually cover the whole range of solution components such as product models, business rules, data models, and service models. Over the past years, have gained increasing attention. is a technique that brings together several process models to create a new process model. In this paper, we introduce process merging for a scenario which focuses on the improvement of an existing AS-IS business process by using a reference process model. We describe an approach that enables a business architect to establish between two process models in a systematic way and show how these correspondences define concrete that serve to improve the AS-IS model.

Industry paper.

Generic reference models are based on the assumption of similarity between enterprises – either cross industrial or within a given sector. The research describes a validated reference metamodel, based on an empirical study of enterprises from various industrial sectors. Drawing on the metamodel, we suggest a methodology and tools for the design and generation of individualized business process models.

Even though the design of business processes most often has to consolidate the knowledge of several process stakeholders, this fact is utilized only to a limited extent by existing modeling methodologies. We address this shortcoming in this paper by building an analogy between database schema design by view integration on the one hand and process modeling on the other hand. In particular, we specify a method for business process design by view integration starting from two views of a process as input. We identify formal semantic relationships between elements of the two process views which are then used to calculate the integrated process model applying the merge operator. Finally, the integrated model is optimized using reduction rules. A case study with two EPC business process models from the SAP reference model demonstrates the applicability of our approach.

The accurate prediction of business process performance during its design phase can facilitate the assessment of existing processes and the generation of alternatives. In this paper, an approximation method to estimate the cycle time of a business process is introduced. First, we propose a process execution scheme, with which Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) can control the execution of processes. Second, an approximation method for analyzing its cycle time, based on queueing theory, is presented. We consider agents as queueing servers with multi-class customers and predict the response time of the agents. The cycle time of the whole process is calculated using the expected response time and process structure, taking into account parallel process execution. Finally, the results from the analytical approximation are validated against those of a simulation. This analysis can be used to obtain an optimal process execution plan.

Surviving in today’s competitive market demands that enterprises improve the efficiency of their business processes not only by their automation, as they have done for years, but also by gaining intelligence about processes that reduce costs and improve performance. Business Process Intelligence (BPI) is an emerging, interdisciplinary area that aims at developing models, techniques and tools to improve different aspects of how business processes are modeled and conducted. BPI is not only the application of Business Intelligence techniques to business processes but it also integrates contributions from other research areas like BAM (Business Activity Monitoring), BOM (Business Operations Management), BPM (Business Performance Management), and others.

The application of process mining techniques to real-life corporate environments has been of an ad-hoc nature so far, focused on proving the concept. One major reason for this rather slow adoption has been the complicated task of transforming real-life event log data to the MXML format used by advanced process mining tools, such as ProM. In this paper, the ProM Import Framework is presented, which has been designed to bridge this gap and to build a stable foundation for the extraction of event log data from any given PAIS implementation. Its flexible and extensible architecture, adherence to open standards, and open source availability make it a versatile contribution to the general BPI community.