Process design
& BPMS
PV207 – Business Process Management
Spring 2014 Jiří Kolář
Last lecture summary:
● Course content & goals
● Team of lecturers and tutors
● BPM intro & history
● Organization
○ Lectures & seminar-sessions organisation
○ Homework assignments
○ Continuous feedback
○ Team project
○ Evaluation and examination
● Information sources
● Questions and intentions
Lecture overview
● Processes
○ What is business
process?
○ What is BPM?
○ Why BPM ?
○ Roles in BPM
○ Process life-cycle
○ Phases of process
based development
● BPMS
○ BPMS components
○ Architecture
○ Human Tasks
○ Business Rules
○ BAM
○ Existing BPMS
Business process definition
Definition:
Series of logically related activities or tasks (such as
planning, production, sales) performed together to
produce a defined set of results.
-- Business Dictionary:
Repeatable sequence of logically related activities,
which contributes to fulfilment of one or more business
objectives
-- Jiří Kolář
Process Example: Order
1. Customer create an Order
2. Order is confirmed by CTO
2.1. If price of the Order is lower than 40 000$, it
is accepted
2.2. If price is over 40 000$ it have to be
confirmed by CFO
3. Order is processed afterwards
Business Process Management
Management discipline for systematic
definition, execution and measurement of
processes in organizations
Picture downloaded from http://www.what-is-bpm.com/bpm_primer/bpm_primer.html
BPM adoption
● Organisational and management changes
towards BPM approach
○ Rengineering
○ Efficiency & quality measurement
○ Certifications, standards & legal compliance
● Tailoring organisation's Information Systems
towards process-oriented principles
○ Business integration (direct link business <-> IT)
○ High level technologies
○ Integration of legacy systems
Business Process Management vs.
Workflow Management
● Workflow ~= Business process
● Work-flow management = definition +
management of work-flows
● Business Process Management = definition +
execution + monitoring+ improvement of
processes
○ Standardization involved
● Workflow system = usually a proprietary
system for execution of defined sequences of
activities
● Know-how codification
○ Value of processes as a know-how is increasing in
today's knowledge economy
○ Less vulnerability caused by employee fluctuation
● Performance and costs measurement
● Better business-change management
○ Changes can be performed easier
○ Impact of change can be measured
○ Important to choose good level of process rigidity
● Increased transparency
Why BPM?
● Outsourcing and business services integration
○ Measurement of outsourced services quality
● Increase of quality
○ Better error detection and exception handling
○ Detection of bottlenecks & weak points of
organisation
○ Compliance with ISO standards (2000X, 9001)
● Better organisation of work-flow /process
○ Higher efficiency = reduction of costs
○ Early detection of problems
Why BPM? (cont.)
Why BPM? (cont.)
● Flattering organisation's
hierarchy
○ Elimination of "silo effect"
○ Horizontal job character
Picture downloaded from http://www.what-is-bpm.com/bpm_primer/bpm_primer.html
BPM disadvantages :(
● Higher initial costs
● Technologies & tools are expensive and
not widely available
● Change of people's mindset is
necessary
● Changes in organization structure
○ Fear of change
○ Loss of jobs
● Support of higher management is crucial
Potential pitfalls of BPM adoption
● Loss of business flexibility
○ Too high process rigidity
● Annoyed employees
● High investments in BPM solution
● Inefficient management changes
● Technological overkill
● Danger of wrong process definitions
Basic roles in BPM adoption
Organisation's stakeholders (Owners,
Management, Customers, Partners etc.)
○ Everybody involved in system context
● Business analyst
○ Identifies and define processes that fulfil goals
● Process specialist
○ Model and implement processes, design service
integration
● System developer (Integration specialist)
○ Implements services and underlying system
components
Process development
● Analysis
● Design
● Implementation
BPM lifecycle
● Roles identification
● Business Goals definition
● Objectives definition
● Identification of existing processes
● Process architecture (relationships)
● Reengineering of existing processes and
definition of new ones
● Metrics/KPI/KRI definition
(Key Performance/Result Indicators)
for Goals/Objectives
0. phase:Business analysis
● Which objective is being fulfilled by the
process?
● What is the value created by the process?
● What are Inputs and Outputs of the
process?
● Which metrics should be on the process?
● Who is Process owner?
● Which roles participate on process?
● Goal:Obtain valid and measurable
processes
1. phase: Process definition
2. phase: Process modeling
● Model logical structure of the process
● Should be readable by all lifecycle
participants
● (BPMN) Business Process Modeling
Notation
○ Graphical notations
○ Portability (Standard)
○ Based on Petri-Nets formalism
● Modeling tools
○ Stand-alone
○ Part of BPMS
3. phase: Implementation
● BPMN-executable (Level 3)
○ BPMN execution engine
○ Services implemented
○ Human task engine
● BPEL (Business Process Execution
Language)
○ Getting deprecated
○ Language for service orchestration
○ XML , Block language
○ BPEL skeleton (template) often generated from BPMN
● XPDL and other minor stuff
4. phase: Monitoring
● Reasons for process monitoring
○ Fault/Error detection
○ Performance measurement
○ Information for process improvement
● Business Activity Monitoring
○ Real-time process monitoring
○ Measurement of process metrics
● Key Performance/Result Indicators
○ Business performance
○ Derived from process metrics
Tracking of business goals fulfillment
● Reasons:
○ Measured gaps in performance
○ Changes of process in real world
● Continuous process improvement:
○ Detection of inefficient parts of process
○ Bottlenecks, cost inefficiency
○ Design and validation of change (simulation)
○ Process modification
○ Deployment of optimised version
○ Monitoring
○ <> repeat until dead;
5.phase : Process improvement
Questions?
Break 10mins
Business Process Management System
● Software suite (related SW tools)
○ modeling, execution and monitoring of processes
○ SW Tools of the process life-cycle phases
● BPMS components
○ Process modeller (OSS, commercial) -modeling
○ Process simulator (commercial with some
exceptions)
○ Execution engine (OSS, commercial)
○ Process console (OSS, commercial)
○ Human tasks engine (commercial with exceptions)
○ Business Rule engine (few OSS, commercial)
○ Business activity monitoring ( commercial ).
BPMS components
Picture downloaded from http://www.what-is-bpm.com/bpm_primer/bpm_primer.html
BPM lifecycle again
Picture downloaded from: http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23943_01/user.1111/e15175/bpmug_intro_bpm_suite.htm
Human tasks
Human tasks = process activities with
necessary human interaction
● Human task engine
○ front-end user interface for human tasks
○ access control according to roles and business
objects from process
○ mostly proprietary solutions,
portals are widely used
Human tasks
● Standards
○ BPMN (Level 3) define human tasks on process level
○ BPEL4People
○ WS-BPEL Extension for People
■ Web Services Human Task
■ Notifications, escalations, timeouts, forwarding,
attachments
○ Implementation
■ Portal technologies
■ Web 2.0 form frameworks
■ Proprietary form solutions in BPMS
Business Rules
● Rules stored aside from process
● External rules repositories
○ Databases
○ XML files
○ Excel tables
● Simple scripting language for rules
evaluation
● Rules are evaluated by Business Rules
Engine
● Rule + Input Business object => Output
Business Rules (cont.)
● User interface for rules management
● Typically IF – THEN
● Rules types
○ Validation rules
○ Transformation rules
● Business Rulesets
● Business Rule Engine often as a Web
Service
● Rules decision in Order process:
○ Rule has parameter (40 000$)
○
○
○
○
○
○
○ We change parameter or replace rule
○ Rules can be changed dynamically
Business Rules – Example
Business Rules Management
system
Business Rules example:
● Business object: Order
○ id – of an order
○ itemPrice – price of one item of order
○ quantity – quantity of item
● finDirDecisionNeeded – boolean identyfying if CFO's
decesion is necessary
● Rule evaluation language:
○ Price of the order is bigger than {threshold}
○ order_price = Order( eval( quantity * itemPrice >
{threshold} ) )
● Rule itself
■ WHEN order_price 40.000 THEN set
finDirDecisionNeeded = true
Business Activity Monitoring
● Monitoring is important part of BPM lifecycle
○ Monitoring data are inputs for process
improvement
○ Early detection of problems
● Process metric examples
○ Order processing time, Order total price, Order state
● KPI examples:
○ Average time of order processing per day
○ Sum of prices of all Orders for this week
○ Number of cancelled Orders this week
○ Percentage of Orders with delayed payment
Business Activity Monitoring -
Dashboards
● Monitoring of process data in real time
● Actions triggered when certain metric
value is reached
○ On screen, Email, SMS
Trigger action/process
● Custom set of figures on one page
● Configurable for every user
BAM Dashboard
Existing BPMS products
● Open source
○ Activiti
○ Intalio | BPMS Community
Edition
○ NetBeans+OpenESB (BPEL)
○ PVM based
■ JBPM/Drool (Jboss)
■ Bonita
■ Orchestra
○ ApacheODE based
■ Project Levi
○ ++
● Commercial
BPMS
○ IBM Lombardi
○ Bizagi
○ Appian 6
○ Opentext/Metastorm
○ Pegasystems
○ Savvion
○ Signavio
○ TIBCO iProcess Suite
○ Oracle BPM suite
○ ARIS enterprise BPMS
○ ++
FIN
Questions?
PV207 – Business Process Management
Spring 2012 Jiří Kolář