Handling the Dataflow in Business Process Models

2018 ◽  
pp. 137-151
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Task Selection ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Order Handling

This chapter stresses the importance of the dataflow in business process models and illustrates a notation called DMA that is meant to fulfill two major goals: promoting the integration between business processes and information systems and leveraging the dataflow to provide flexibility in terms of human decisions. The first goal is fulfilled by considering both tasks and business entities as first-class citizens in process models. Business entities form the dataflow that interconnects the tasks: tasks take the input entities from the input dataflow and deliver the output entities to the output dataflow. Human decisions encompass the selection of the input entities when a task needs more than one, and the selection of the task with which to handle the input entities when two or more tasks are admissible. DMA provides a number of patterns that indicate how tasks affect the dataflow. In addition, two compound patterns, called macro tasks, can be used to represent task selection issues. An example related to an order handling process illustrates the notation.

Handling the Dataflow in Business Process Models

2020 ◽  
pp. 1681-1695
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Information Systems ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Task Selection ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
Selection Of ◽  
Order Handling

This chapter stresses the importance of the dataflow in business process models and illustrates a notation called DMA that is meant to fulfill two major goals: promoting the integration between business processes and information systems and leveraging the dataflow to provide flexibility in terms of human decisions. The first goal is fulfilled by considering both tasks and business entities as first-class citizens in process models. Business entities form the dataflow that interconnects the tasks: tasks take the input entities from the input dataflow and deliver the output entities to the output dataflow. Human decisions encompass the selection of the input entities when a task needs more than one, and the selection of the task with which to handle the input entities when two or more tasks are admissible. DMA provides a number of patterns that indicate how tasks affect the dataflow. In addition, two compound patterns, called macro tasks, can be used to represent task selection issues. An example related to an order handling process illustrates the notation.

Representations of Artifact-Centric Business Processes

2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-61
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Structure Dynamics ◽  
Pros And Cons ◽  
Business Entities

Current approaches to the representation of business processes can be divided into two major categories, referred to as activity-centric and artifact-centric. The former underline the tasks as the basic units of work, and the latter stress the importance of the life cycles of the artifacts (i.e., the business entities). This paper analyzes the major issues that characterize the artifact-centric approach, i.e., structure, dynamics and coordination. These issues can be dealt with in various ways, ranging from separate models to holistic ones. The pros and cons of separate models and compact ones are analyzed on the basis of how they cope with three relevant aspects, i.e., aggregation, synchronization and matching. A number of motivating examples are presented along with the notation used to define them. This notation, named ARTS (ARtifacts and TAsks), considers both artifacts and tasks as first-class citizens of business process models.

Viewpoints on Business Process Models

2018 ◽  
pp. 788-798
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Life Cycles ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
Operational Activities

Over the past few years a number of viewpoints have influenced the design of notations for business processes. They emphasize the different elements (tasks, business entities and roles) that compose business process models; for this reason, they are referred to as activity-centric, data-centric, and role-centric viewpoints. The activity-centric viewpoint focuses on the orchestration of operational activities, which encompass human tasks and automatic ones. On the contrary, the data-centric viewpoint stresses the identification of the key business entities and their life cycles consisting of states and transitions. In the role-centric viewpoint, a process model is made up of several “role” models; each role model provides a restricted view of the process limited to the behavior of the role under consideration. This article illustrates how the above-mentioned viewpoints can be extracted from a global model, with the help of an example concerning the submission of papers to conferences.

Integrating Business Processes and Information Systems in an Interorganizational Context

2011 ◽  
pp. 136-153
Author(s):  
Peter Rittgen
Keyword(s):  
Information System ◽  
Information Systems ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Unified Modeling Language ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Unified Modeling ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
System Models ◽  
Close Cooperation

When organizations engage in close cooperation they usually need to reorganize the business processes that serve the interface between them. This reorganization is often done with the help of business process models. As a result, the underlying information systems have to be adapted, too. The changes to the latter can be supported by information system models which are typically “written” in a different language from that of the business processes. Here we suggest an approach to facilitate the development of information system models based on the models of the respective business processes. This is achieved by mapping a suitable business process language to the Unified Modeling Language. We apply this approach in the context of an interorganizational business process.

Semantic Annotation of Process Models for Facilitating Process Knowledge Management

2010 ◽  
Vol 1 (3) ◽  
pp. 45-67 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yun Lin ◽  
John Krogstie
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Information Systems ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Semantic Annotation ◽  
Empirical Evaluation ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Process Knowledge ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Distributed Process

Enterprise/business process models that represent knowledge of business processes are generally designed for particular applications in a range of different enterprises. It is a considerable challenge to manage the knowledge of processes that are distributed throughout many different information systems, due to the heterogeneity of the process models used. In this paper, the authors present a framework for semantic annotation that tackles the problem of the heterogeneity of distributed process models to facilitate management of process knowledge. The feasibility of the approach is demonstrated by means of exemplar studies, and a comprehensive empirical evaluation is used to validate the authors’ approach.

Combining Flexibility and Data Handling in Business Process Models

2014 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
pp. 14-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Data Handling ◽  
Task Selection ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Human Decision ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
High Level ◽  
Customer Orders

Flexibility and data handling are two hot topics in current research on business process models. However, these issues are tackled separately through declarative languages and artifact-centric approaches, respectively. It follows that the situations in which the choice of the task to perform is a human decision affected by the presence of suitable input entities are not adequately handled; unfortunately, these situations are common in several industrial processes such as build-to-order ones. An integrated approach able to combine flexibility and data handling is needed and to this end this paper presents a notation named ENTA (ENtities and TAsks): it makes both business entities and tasks first-class citizens in process models and it provides high-level descriptions of the tasks in terms of intended effects and constraints to be met. Some examples of order handling processes are used to explain the issues of entity selection and task selection: deciding which customer orders can be associated with the same supplier order is a case of entity selection while deciding whether to generate a new supplier order for the customer orders selected or to add them to an existing supplier order is a case of task selection.

Viewpoints on Business Process Models

2019 ◽  
pp. 405-416
Author(s):  
Giorgio Bruno
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Role Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Global Model ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Business Entities ◽  
Operational Activities

Over the past few years, a number of viewpoints have influenced the design of notations for business processes. They emphasize the different elements (tasks, business entities, and roles) that compose business process models; for this reason, they are referred to as activity-centric, data-centric, and role-centric viewpoints. The activity-centric viewpoint focuses on the orchestration of operational activities, which encompass human tasks and automatic ones. On the contrary, the data-centric viewpoint stresses the identification of the key business entities and their lifecycles consisting of states and transitions. In the role-centric viewpoint, a process model is made up of several “role” models; each role model provides a restricted view of the process limited to the behavior of the role under consideration. This chapter illustrates how the above-mentioned viewpoints can be extracted from a global model, with the help of an example concerning the submission of papers to conferences.

scholarly journals Business processes exceptions in relation to operational performance

2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 908-922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remco Dijkman ◽  
Oktay Turetken ◽  
Geoffrey Robert van IJzendoorn ◽  
Meint de Vries
Keyword(s):  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Operational Performance ◽  
Normal Flow ◽  
Throughput Time ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose Business process models describe the way of working in an organization. Typically, business process models distinguish between the normal flow of work and exceptions to that normal flow. However, they often present an idealized view. This means that unexpected exceptions – exceptions that are not modeled in the business process model – can also occur in practice. This has an effect on the efficiency of the organization, because information systems are not developed to handle unexpected exceptions. The purpose of this paper is to study the relation between the occurrence of exceptions and operational performance. Design/methodology/approach The paper does this by analyzing the execution logs of business processes from five organizations, classifying execution paths as normal or exceptional. Subsequently, it analyzes the differences between normal and exceptional paths. Findings The results show that exceptions are related to worse operational performance in terms of a longer throughput time and that unexpected exceptions relate to a stronger increase in throughput time than expected exceptions. Practical implications These findings lead to practical implications on policies that can be followed with respect to exceptions. Most importantly, unexpected exceptions should be avoided by incorporating them into the process – and thus transforming them into expected exceptions – as much as possible. Also, as not all exceptions lead to longer throughput times, continuous improvement should be employed to continuously monitor the occurrence of exceptions and make decisions on their desirability in the process. Originality/value While work exists on analyzing the occurrence of exceptions in business processes, especially in the context of process conformance analysis, to the best of the authors’ knowledge this is the first work that analyzes the possible consequences of such exceptions.

scholarly journals Collaborative method to maintain business process models updated

2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuno Castela ◽  
Paulo Dias ◽  
Marielba Zacarias ◽  
José Tribolet
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Business Process ◽  
Process Model ◽  
Business Processes ◽  
Process Models ◽  
Organizational Environment ◽  
Business Process Model ◽  
Business Process Models ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Over Time

Business process models are often forgotten after their creation and its representation is not usually updated. This appears to be negative as processes evolve over time. This paper discusses the issue of business process models maintenance through the definition of a collaborative method that creates interaction contexts enabling business actors to discuss about business processes, sharing business knowledge. The collaboration method extends the discussion about existing process representations to all stakeholders promoting their update. This collaborative method contributes to improve business process models, allowing updates based in change proposals and discussions, using a groupware tool that was developed. Four case studies were developed in real organizational environment. We came to the conclusion that the defined method and the developed tool can help organizations to maintain a business process model updated based on the inputs and consequent discussions taken by the organizational actors who participate in the processes.

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