A Framework for XML-Based Workflow Interoperability - The AFRICA Project

With the advance of electronic business relationships over the internet, the linking of cross-organizational business processes in virtual supply chains and other scenarios is rapidly increasing. Existing standards for the interoperability of information systems on the business process level are being adapted to suit the needs of the Internet economy. Especially the use of XML as a domain-independent encoding standard for business documents has led to the development of business frameworks such as BizTalk or open/EDI, and interoperability mechanisms that support these standards are being developed. In this paper we describe an architecture for the support of cross-organizational workflows through XML messages. This architecture has been implemented and tested within the AFRICA project at the University of Muenster, Germany. While our work is based upon the emerging Wf-XML standard of the Workflow Management Coalition, it contains a number of significant enhancements that provide a secure, reliable management of global workflow processes

Deployment of Business to Business Scenarios in ERP Education: Evaluation and Experiences from an International Collaboration

Collaboration between Universities has increased in an attempt to help curriculum stay abreast with the business of the 21 st century. Many businesses have extended to an e-business world that is business to business process oriented, web-centric, and ERP driven. Developing effective collaborative methods that simulate this new process oriented e-business world remains a challenge. This paper presents a description of the collaboration and the preliminary evaluation results, in the form of students feedback, of an international collaboration between two universities that address these issues of new e-centric business practices. The collaboration deploys a case scenario methodology that utilizes SAP R/3 and the web to link geographically dispersed students. A description of the collaborative method and a report on the lessons learned in deploying this type of collaboration is provided. Keywords: Enterprise resource planning, collaboration, inter-organizational processes, curriculu

From the Stone Age to the Cloud: A Case Study of Risk-Focused Process Improvement

Organizations strive to continually improve organizational performance while maintaining compliance to increasingly complex rules and regulations. Several methods and techniques for the identification and management of operational risks in business processes have been proposed in the academic literature, yet there are few examples of practical applications. This paper addresses this gap through a case study of a process improvement project that employed some of the proposed risk and compliance management techniques. We describe a business process reengineering project within the purchasing and accounts payable operations of a university United States. The project focused on improving service quality by improving the transparency and predictability of operations through the introduction of a workflow management system. We outline the stepwise transformation of manual process operations through technology, and discuss the risk and compliance objectives identified throughout the project and their impact on process design. This case study illustrates how process re-engineering techniques can improve process designs while balancing performance and compliance objectives. It provides guidance for the selection of an appropriate level of abstraction during process analysis and demonstrates how process objectives and technology capabilities shape the design of to-be processes

Primitives: Design Guidelines and Architecture for BPMN Models

The Business Process Modeling Notation has emerged as a popular choice for representing processes among Business Analysts and Information Systems professionals. While the BPMN specification provides a rich syntax for the capture and representation of process models, it does not provide any guidance for the organization of the resulting models. As a consequence, large process libraries may become disorganized and hard to manage due to variability in abstraction levels, process interfaces, and activity descriptions. Based on the analysis of a process library in a US government agency we present a proposal for design guidelines and use our design guideline to qualitatively assess existing work on model quality guidance. To better organize models at different abstraction levels we propose a process architecture that allows for the systematic organization of BPMN models for different stakeholder concerns

A framework of issues in large process modeling projects

As process management projects have increased in size due to globalised and company-wide initiatives, a corresponding growth in the size of process modeling projects can be observed. Despite advances in languages, tools and methodologies, several aspects of these projects have been largely ignored by the academic community. This paper makes a first contribution to a potential research agenda in this field by defining the characteristics of large-scale process modeling projects and proposing a framework of related issues. These issues are derived from a semi-structured interview and six focus groups conducted in Australia, Germany and the USA with enterprise and modeling software vendors and customers. The focus groups confirm the existence of unresolved problems in business process modeling projects. The outcomes provide a research agenda which directs researchers into further studies in global process management, process model decomposition and the overall governance of process modeling projects. It is expected that this research agenda will provide guidance to researchers and practitioners by focusing on areas of high theoretical and practical relevance

Integrating Risks in Business Process Models

In the context of process management, risk has been considered mainly from a project management perspective. But risk is an inherent property of every business process and techniques are needed to identify, represent and analyse business process risks. The absence of such techniques is a concern because both operational risk mitigation and legal compliance depend on the sufficient identification of corporate risk. This paper addresses the topic of risk management in the context of business process management. We present a taxonomy of process- related risks and discuss how this taxonomy can be applied in the analysis and documentation of business processes. We demonstrate how a contemporary process modelling method can be extended to document process-related risks and their relationships with goals, other risks and processes. A critical administrative process in an university is used as an example

Sometimes less is more: Are process modeling languages overly complex

Modern business process modeling languages such as BPMN or EPC provide users with more constructs to represent real world situations than their predecessors such as IDEF or Petri Nets. But this apparent increase in expressiveness is accompanied by an increase in language complexity. In practice many organizations choose to only use a subset of the available modeling constructs. Using a well-established ontology-based theory of representation, we analyze how this voluntary restriction affects the expressiveness and complexity of the resulting modeling vocabulary. We compare our empirical findings with two notation sets of the popular language BPMN – the core and full set. Our findings indicate that users are willing to accept ambiguity among modeling constructs and that the full element set of BPMN adds little expressiveness at the expense of considerably decreased ontological clarity. The findings are a first step towards an understanding of an optimal cost-effectiveness ratio for process modeling languages- both in theory and practice