On the Usage of Labels and Icons in Business Process Modeling

Author(s):  
Jan Mendling ◽  
Jan Recker ◽  
Hajo A. Reijers

The value of business process models is dependent on the choice of graphical elements in the model and their annotation with additional textual and graphical information. This research discusses the use of text and icons for labeling the graphical constructs in a process model. The authors use two established verb classification schemes to examine the choice of activity labels in process modeling practice. Based on the author’s findings, this paper synthesizes a set of twenty-five activity label categories. Proposed is a systematic approach for graphically representing these label categories through the use of graphical icons, such that the resulting process models are easier and more readily understandable by end users. The author’s findings contribute to an ongoing stream of research investigating the practice of process modeling and thereby contribute to the body of knowledge about conceptual modeling quality overall.

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 116
Author(s):  
Hilman Nuril Hadi ◽  
Tri Astoto Kurniawan ◽  
Ismiarta Aknuranda

BPMN has become the standard of business process modeling indescribing the existing series of business process. By engaging BPMN, an analystwould possibly able to model the whole business process activities in whichhe/she may analyze business process upon design time. It can be done byanalyzing the structure, behavior, or semantic of process model. In certaincondition one may ask a question what would the effects of the process be if itwere to be executed up to this point?. However, it cannot be solved with onlygraphical notation, but with its semantics. In practice, several modeling tools stilldo not provide a feature for managing information regarding the effects/resultsin the business process model. In fact, analysts should be supported with a toolin order to semantically enrich a process model with its effects. This articledescribes effect annotation semantically towards activity in the BPMN modelincluding the rules in representing its effects. The effect annotation will be suitedtowards activity type (atomic and compound activities). The outcomes of plugin development of eclipse BPMN2 modeler for representing semantic effect arealso described in this paper.


2010 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 14-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rong Liu ◽  
Frederick Y. Wu ◽  
Santhosh Kumaran

Much of the prior work in business process modeling is activity-centric. Recently, an information-centric approach has emerged, where a business process is modeled as the interacting lifecycles of business entities. The benefits of this approach are documented in a number of case studies. In this paper, the authors formalize the information-centric approach and derive the relationships between the two approaches. The authors formally define the notion of a business entity, provide an algorithm to transform an activity-centric model into an information-centric process model, and demonstrate the equivalence between these two models. Further, they show the value of transforming from the activity-centric paradigm to the information-centric paradigm in business process componentization and Service-Oriented Architecture design and also provide an empirical evaluation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-76
Author(s):  
Salma Fatia ◽  
Muhammad Ainul Yaqin ◽  
Adi Heru Utomo

Abstract— In an organizational environment, there are various business process models with the same procedures. If an organization builds a system with the same procedure repeatedly, it will undoubtedly incur a lot of effort and money. Therefore, it is necessary to extract common fragments to save effort. This research uses four scenarios of business process models: sequence, branching, nested branching, and looping. This study uses Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) notation so that the process model consists of activities, connectors, and gateways. Structural similarity is measured using the Jaccard similarity formula by comparing the process model. The similarity of behavior is measured using the Transition Adjacency Relations (TARs) method to obtain common fragments. The results show that the sequence process model will produce a common fragment that tends to be sequential too. The branching will produce a common fragment that tends to branch, and nested branching will produce a common fragment that tends to be branched and nested, as well as looping will produce a common fragment contains looping too. The experimental results show that the proposed method can extract common fragments based on the available business process models. Keywords—BPMN; common fragment; behavioral similarity; TARs   Abstrak— Dalam lingkungan organisasi, terdapat berbagai model proses bisnis dengan prosedur yang sama. Jika suatu organisasi membangun sistem dengan prosedur yang sama secara berulang-ulang, niscaya akan mengeluarkan banyak tenaga dan biaya. Oleh karena itu, perlu mengekstrak fragmen umum untuk menghemat tenaga. Penelitian ini menggunakan empat skenario model proses bisnis yaitu sequence, branching, nested branching, dan looping. Penelitian ini menggunakan notasi Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) sehingga model proses terdiri dari aktivitas, konektor, dan gateway. Kemiripan struktural diukur menggunakan rumus kemiripan Jaccard dengan membandingkan model proses. Kesamaan perilaku diukur menggunakan metode Transition Adjacency Relations (TARs) untuk mendapatkan fragmen yang sama. Hasil penelitian menunjukkan bahwa model sequence process akan menghasilkan common fragment yang cenderung berurutan juga. Percabangan akan menghasilkan fragmen umum yang cenderung bercabang, dan percabangan bersarang akan menghasilkan fragmen umum yang cenderung bercabang dan bersarang, serta perulangan akan menghasilkan fragmen umum yang berisi perulangan juga. Hasil eksperimen menunjukkan bahwa metode yang diusulkan dapat mengekstrak fragmen umum berdasarkan model proses bisnis yang tersedia. Keywords—BPMN; common fragment; kemiripan perilaku; TARs


2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Piotr Wiśniewski ◽  
Krzysztof Kluza ◽  
Edyta Kucharska ◽  
Antoni Ligęza

Business process models help to visualize processes of an organization. In enterprises, these processes are often specified in internal regulations, resolutions or other law acts of a company. Such descriptions, like task lists, have mostly form of enumerated lists or spreadsheets. In this paper, we present a mapping of process model elements into a spreadsheet representation. As a process model can be represented in various notations, this can be seen as an interoperability solution for process knowledge interchange between different representations. In presenting the details of the solution, we focus on the popular BPMN representation, which is a de facto standard for business process modeling. We present a method how to generate a BPMN process model from a spreadsheet-based representation. In contrast to the other existing approaches concerning spreadsheets, our method does not require explicit specification of gateways in the spreadsheet, but it takes advantage of nested list form. Such a spreadsheet can be created either manually or merged from the task list specifications provided by users.


2013 ◽  
Vol 22 (01) ◽  
pp. 1350003 ◽  
Author(s):  
LAURA SÁNCHEZ-GONZÁLEZ ◽  
FÉLIX GARCÍA ◽  
FRANCISCO RUIZ ◽  
MARIO PIATTINI

Business process modeling is recognized as a key part of the business process lifecycle. It is during this stage that a conceptual model is produced by collecting business process requirements and representing them with a specific business process notation. While there has been much research into process modeling techniques, little has taken place with regard to the characteristics that should be considered for an effective assessment of the models' quality. This paper presents a synthesis of quality characteristics for business process models, based on a systematic review of the relevant literature. It then goes on to describe a reference model for the quality assessment of business process models, and to relate the aforementioned quality characteristics to existing relevant process model measures. These relations may help organizations to guide the improvement of their business process models according to their chosen quality characteristics.


Author(s):  
Rong Liu ◽  
Frederick Y. Wu ◽  
Santhosh Kumaran

Much of the prior work in business process modeling is activity-centric. Recently, an information-centric approach has emerged, where a business process is modeled as the interacting lifecycles of business entities. The benefits of this approach are documented in a number of case studies. In this paper, the authors formalize the information-centric approach and derive the relationships between the two approaches. The authors formally define the notion of a business entity, provide an algorithm to transform an activity-centric model into an information-centric process model, and demonstrate the equivalence between these two models. Further, they show the value of transforming from the activity-centric paradigm to the information-centric paradigm in business process componentization and Service-Oriented Architecture design and also provide an empirical evaluation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (5) ◽  
pp. 908-922 ◽  
Author(s):  
Remco Dijkman ◽  
Oktay Turetken ◽  
Geoffrey Robert van IJzendoorn ◽  
Meint de Vries

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.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (4-2) ◽  
pp. 349
Author(s):  
Ivaylo Kamenarov ◽  
Katalina Grigorova

This paper describes the internal data model for a business process generator. Business process models are stored in an Event-driven process chain notation that provides a natural way to link the individual elements of a process. There is a software architecture that makes it easy to communicate with users as well as external systems.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-46
Author(s):  
Florian Spree

Predictive process monitoring is a subject of growing interest in academic research. As a result, an increased number of papers on this topic have been published. Due to the high complexity in this research area a wide range of different experimental setups and methods have been applied which makes it very difficult to reliably compare research results. This paper's objective is to investigate how business process models and their characteristics are used during experimental setups and how they can contribute to academic research. First, a literature review is conducted to analyze and discuss the awareness of business process models in experimental setups. Secondly, the paper discusses identified research problems and proposes the concept of a web-based business process model metric suite and the idea of ranked metrics. Through a metric suite researchers and practitioners can automatically evaluate business process model characteristics in their future work. Further, a contextualization of metrics by introducing a ranking of characteristics can potentially indicate how the outcome of experimental setups will be. Hence, the paper's work demonstrates the importance of business process models and their characteristics in the context of predictive process monitoring and proposes the concept of a tool approach and ranking to reliably evaluate business process models characteristics.


2014 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 461-480 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nuno Castela ◽  
Paulo Dias ◽  
Marielba Zacarias ◽  
José Tribolet

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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