Refactoring Process Models in Large Process Repositories.

With the increasing adoption of process-aware information systems (PAIS), large process model repositories have emerged. Over time respective models have to be re-aligned to the real-world business processes through customization or adaptation. This bears the risk that model redundancies are introduced and complexity is increased. If no continuous investment is made in keeping models simple, changes are becoming increasingly costly and error-prone. Though refactoring techniques are widely used in software engineering to address related problems, this does not yet constitute state-of-the art in business process management. Process designers either have to refactor process models by hand or cannot apply respective techniques at all. This paper proposes a set of behaviour-preserving techniques for refactoring large process repositories. This enables process designers to eectively deal with model complexity by making process models better understandable and easier to maintain

Best practices in business process redesign: Use and impact

Purpose - This paper seeks to provide business process redesign (BPR) practitioners and academics with insight into the most popular heuristics to derive improved process designs. Design/methodology/approach - An online survey was carried out in the years 2003-2004 among a wide range of experienced BPR practitioners in the UK and The Netherlands. Findings - The survey indicates that this top ten of best practices is indeed extensively used in practice. Moreover, indications for their business impact have been collected and classified. Research limitations/implications - The authors\u27 estimations of best practices effectiveness differed from feedback obtained from respondents, possibly caused by the design of the survey instrument. This is food for further research. Practical implications - The presented framework can be used by practitioners to keep the various aspects of a redesign in perspective. The presented list of BPR best practices is directly applicable to derive new process designs. Originality/value - This paper addresses the subject of process redesign, rather than the more popular subject of process reengineering. As such, it fills in part an existing gap in knowledge. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Best practices in business process redesign: Use and impact

Purpose - This paper seeks to provide business process redesign (BPR) practitioners and academics with insight into the most popular heuristics to derive improved process designs. Design/methodology/approach - An online survey was carried out in the years 2003-2004 among a wide range of experienced BPR practitioners in the UK and The Netherlands. Findings - The survey indicates that this top ten of best practices is indeed extensively used in practice. Moreover, indications for their business impact have been collected and classified. Research limitations/implications - The authors\u27 estimations of best practices effectiveness differed from feedback obtained from respondents, possibly caused by the design of the survey instrument. This is food for further research. Practical implications - The presented framework can be used by practitioners to keep the various aspects of a redesign in perspective. The presented list of BPR best practices is directly applicable to derive new process designs. Originality/value - This paper addresses the subject of process redesign, rather than the more popular subject of process reengineering. As such, it fills in part an existing gap in knowledge. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Investigating Differences between Graphical and Textual Declarative Process Models

Declarative approaches to business process modeling are regarded as well suited for highly volatile environments, as they enable a high degree of flexibility. However, problems in understanding declarative process models often impede their adoption. Particularly, a study revealed that aspects that are present in both imperative and declarative process modeling languages at a graphical level-while having different semantics-cause considerable troubles. In this work we investigate whether a notation that does not contain graphical lookalikes, i.e., a textual notation, can help to avoid this problem. Even though a textual representation does not suffer from lookalikes, in our empirical study it performed worse in terms of error rate, duration and mental effort, as the textual representation forces the reader to mentally merge the textual information. Likewise, subjects themselves expressed that the graphical representation is easier to understand

Multi-level Autonomic Business Process Management

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_14Nowadays, business processes are becoming increasingly complex and heterogeneous. Autonomic Computing principles can reduce this complexity by autonomously managing the software systems and the running processes, their states and evolution. Business Processes that are able to be self-managed are referred to as Autonomic Business Processes (ABP). However, a key challenge is to keep the models of such ABP understandable and expressive in increasingly complex scenarios. This paper discusses the design aspects of an autonomic business process management system able to self-manage processes based on operational adaptation. The goal is to minimize human intervention during the process definition and execution phases. This novel approach, named MABUP, provides four well-defined levels of abstraction to express business and operational knowledge and to guide the management activity; namely, Organizational Level, Technological Level, Operational Level and Service Level. A real example is used to illustrate our proposal.Research supported by CAPES, CNPQ and Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation.Oliveira, K.; Castro, J.; España Cubillo, S.; Pastor López, O. (2013). Multi-level Autonomic Business Process Management. En Enterprise, Business-Process and Information Systems Modeling. Springer. 184-198. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-38484-4_14S184198España, S., González, A., Pastor, Ó.: Communication Analysis: A Requirements Engineering Method for Information Systems. In: van Eck, P., Gordijn, J., Wieringa, R. (eds.) CAiSE 2009. LNCS, vol. 5565, pp. 530–545. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)Ganek, A.G., Corbi, T.A.: The dawning of the autonomic computing era. IBM Systems Journal 42(1), 5–18 (2003)Gonzalez, A., et al.: Unity criteria for Business Process Modelling. In: Third International Conference on Research Challenges in Information Science, RCIS 2009, pp. 155–164 (2009)Greenwood, D., Rimassa, G.: Autonomic Goal-Oriented Business Process Management. Management, 43 (2007)Haupt, T., et al.: Autonomic execution of computational workflows. In: 2011 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems, FedCSIS, pp. 965–972 (2011)Kephart, J.O., Chess, D.M.: The vision of autonomic computing. IEEE (2003)Lee, K., et al.: Workflow adaptation as an autonomic computing problem. In: Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Workflows in Support of Large-Scale Science, New York, NY, USA, pp. 29–34 (2007)Mosincat, A., Binder, W.: Transparent Runtime Adaptability for BPEL Processes. In: Bouguettaya, A., Krueger, I., Margaria, T. (eds.) ICSOC 2008. LNCS, vol. 5364, pp. 241–255. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Oliveira, K., et al.: Towards Autonomic Business Process Models. In: International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge, SEKE 2012, San Francisco, California, USA (2012)Rahman, M., et al.: A taxonomy and survey on autonomic management of applications in grid computing environments. Concurr. Comput.: Pract. Exper. 23(16), 1990–2019 (2011)Reijers, H.A., Mendling, J.: Modularity in process models: Review and effects. In: Dumas, M., Reichert, M., Shan, M.-C. (eds.) BPM 2008. LNCS, vol. 5240, pp. 20–35. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Rodrigues Nt., J.A., Monteiro Jr., P.C.L., de O. Sampaio, J., de Souza, J.M., Zimbrão, G.: Autonomic Business Processes Scalable Architecture. In: ter Hofstede, A.H.M., Benatallah, B., Paik, H.-Y. (eds.) BPM Workshops 2007. LNCS, vol. 4928, pp. 78–83. Springer, Heidelberg (2008)Strohmaier, M., Yu, E.: Towards autonomic workflow management systems. ACM Press (2006)Terres, L.D., et al.: Selection of Business Process for Autonomic Automation. In: 2010 14th IEEE International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference, pp. 237–246 (October 2010)Tretola, G., Zimeo, E.: Autonomic internet-scale workflows. In: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Monitoring, Adaptation and Beyond, New York, NY, USA, pp. 48–56 (2010)Vedam, H., Venkatasubramanian, V.: A wavelet theory-based adaptive trend analysis system for process monitoring and diagnosis. In: Proceedings of the 1997 American Control Conference, vol. 1, pp. 309–313 (June 1997)Wang, Y., Mylopoulos, J.: Self-Repair through Reconfiguration: A Requirements Engineering Approach. In: 2009 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pp. 257–268 (November 2009)Yu, T., Lin, K.: Adaptive algorithms for finding replacement services in autonomic distributed business processes. In: Proceedings Autonomous Decentralized Systems, ISADS 2005, pp. 427–434 (2005

BPR Implementation: A Decision-Making Strategy

To support the efficient appraisal and selection of available best practices, this paper proposes a strategy for the implementation of Business Process Redesign (BPR). Its backbone is formed by the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) multi-criteria method and our earlier research on the popularity and impact of redesign best practices. Using (AHP) we derive a classification of most suitable best practices for the process being redesigned. Criteria such as the popularity, the impact, the goals and the risks of BPR implementation are taken into account. A case study of a municipality in the Netherlands is included. It discusses which best practices should be applied to redesign the invoicing process at the municipality. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006

Modeling styles in business process modeling

Research on quality issues of business process models has recently begun to explore the process of creating process models. As a consequence, the question arises whether different ways of creating process models exist. In this vein, we observed 115 students engaged in the act of modeling, recording all their interactions with the modeling environment using a specialized tool. The recordings of process modeling were subsequently clustered. Results presented in this paper suggest the existence of three distinct modeling styles, exhibiting significantly different characteristics. We believe that this finding constitutes another building block toward a more comprehensive understanding of the process of process modeling that will ultimately enable us to support modelers in creating better business process models. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

Trade-offs in the performance of workflows - quantifying the impact of best practices

Business process redesign is one of the most powerful ways to boost business performance and to improve customer satisfaction [14]. A possible approach to business process redesign is using redesign best practices. A previous study identified a set of 29 different redesign best practices [18]. However, little is known about the exact impact of these redesign best practices on workflow performance. This study proposes an approach that can be used to quantify the impact of a business process redesign project on all dimensions of workflow performance. The approach consists of a large set of performance measures and a simulation toolkit. It supports the quantification of the impact of the implementation of redesign best practices, in order to determine what best practice or combination of best practices leads to the most favorable effect in a specific business process. The approach is developed based on a quantification project for the parallel best practice [8] and is validated with two other quantification projects, namely for the knockout and triage best practices