Paving the Road to Business Process Administration

Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) have been helped to achieve an important role in business process modeling by the commercial success of SAP and ARIS. Both users and IT experts may describe the process to be modelled from their individual perspectives. Event-driven Process Chains, therefore, create a common platform for communication and the analysis of ideas beyond the boundaries of both application and information-system domains. This is accomplished by a semiformal semantics, which gives the participants greater freedom of expression but leads to unintended ambiguities clearly undesirable in later stages of development such as design and implementation. In the literature, several approaches to this problem have been suggested including definitions of a formal semantics for EPCs. We investigate difficulties with such approaches and suggest two solutions: the introduction of a new logical connector (XORAND) and a slight modification of the OR join. This facilitates the design of correct EPCs while continuing to allow freedom of expression, thus enabling a smoother transition into the more formal phases of software development such as design and implementation. A comparative experiment validates these results

Conceptualizing Routing Decisions in Business Processes: Theoretical Analysis and Empirical Testing

Business process models are widely used for purposes such as analyzing information systems, improving operational efficiency, modeling supply chains, and re-engineering business processes. A critical aspect of process representation involves a choice among alternative or parallel routes. Such choices are usually represented in process models by routing structures that appear as “split” and “merge” nodes. However, evidence indicates that modelers face difficulties representing routing options correctly. Clearly, errors in representing routing options might negatively affect the effective use of business process models. We suggest that this difficulty can be mitigated by providing process modelers with a catalog of routing possibilities described in terms that are meaningful to analysts. Based on theoretical considerations, we develop such a catalog and demonstrate that its entries have business meaning and that it is complete with respect to a defined scope of process behaviors that do not depend on resources or on software features. The catalog includes some routing cases not previously recognized. We tested experimentally the catalog in helping subjects understand process behavior. The findings demonstrate that the catalog helps modelers understand and conceptualize process behavior and that the likely reasons are its completeness and the practical terms used to describe its entries

Musterbasierte Kontrollflusssemantik für Geschäftsprozessmodellierungssprachen

Die Bedeutung einzelner Symbole ist bei Geschäftsprozessmodellierungssprachen häufig nicht eindeutig festgelegt, wodurch Missverständnisse zwischen Domänenexperten und Modellierern gefördert werden. In dieser Arbeit wird eine auf Kontrollflussmustern basierende Methode zur Beschreibung der Kontrollflusssemantik von graphischen Geschäftsprozessmodellierungssprachen vorgestellt. Darüber hinaus werden die effiziente Anwendbarkeit und grundsätzliche Nützlichkeit der Methode aufgezeigt