Changing products, changing processes : dealing with small updates in product-based design

In the method of "product-based design" (PBD), a direct relation exists between the design of a business process and the characteristics of the end product that such a process should deliver. This offers many benefits over more traditional business process redesign approaches. This paper takes into consideration that any end product is subject to (frequent) change. While it is technically feasible with PBD to generate a new design from an updated product specification, it may be more efficient to update the existing process design directly when a change is small. In this paper, such small product changes are investigated and it is described how a process design should be changed in accordance with them. The presented results contribute to an improved application of PBD in practice in the field of process management

Product based workflow support : a recommendation service for dynamic workflow execution

Product Based Workflow Design (PBWD) is a revolutionary and successful new approach to workflow process support. A description of the product, the Product Data Model (PDM), is central in this approach. While other research so far has focused on deriving a process model from the PDM, this paper presents a way to directly execute the PDM, leading to a more dynamic and flexible support for the workflow process. Based on the information available for a case the next step to be performed is determined using a strategy of e.g. lowest cost or shortest processing time. A prototype implementing these execution recommendations is presented

Product based workflow support : a recommendation service for dynamic workflow execution

Product Based Workflow Design (PBWD) is a revolutionary and successful new approach to workflow process support. A description of the product, the Product Data Model (PDM), is central in this approach. While other research so far has focused on deriving a process model from the PDM, this paper presents a way to directly execute the PDM, leading to a more dynamic and flexible support for the workflow process. Based on the information available for a case the next step to be performed is determined using a strategy of e.g. lowest cost or shortest processing time. A prototype implementing these execution recommendations is presented

Modeling and enacting complex data dependencies in business processes

Enacting business processes in process engines requires the coverage of control flow, resource assignments, and process data. While the first two aspects are well supported in current process engines, data dependencies need to be added and maintained manually by a process engineer. Thus, this task is error-prone and time-consuming. In this report, we address the problem of modeling processes with complex data dependencies, e.g., m:n relationships, and their automatic enactment from process models. First, we extend BPMN data objects with few annotations to allow data dependency handling as well as data instance differentiation. Second, we introduce a pattern-based approach to derive SQL queries from process models utilizing the above mentioned extensions. Therewith, we allow automatic enactment of data-aware BPMN process models. We implemented our approach for the Activiti process engine to show applicability. Keywords: Process Modeling, Data Modeling, Process Enactment, BPMN, SQ