A key aspect in any process-oriented organisation is the measurement of process performance for the achievement of its strategic and operational goals. Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a key asset to carry out this evaluation, and, therefore, the management of these PPIs throughout the whole BP lifecycle is crucial. in this demo we present PPINOT Tool Suite, a set of tools aimed at facilitating and automating the PPI management. The support includes their definition using either a graphical or a template-based textual notation, their automated analysis at design-time, and their automated computation based on the instrumentation of a Business Process Management System

Cabanillas Macías, Cristina

Resinas Arias de Reyna, Manuel

Ruiz Cortés, Antonio

Río Ortega, Adela del

idUS. Depósito de Investigación Universidad de Sevilla

PPINOT Tool Suite: A PerformanceManagement Solution for Process-OrientedOrganisations?Adela del-R´ıo-Ortega, Cristina Cabanillas, Manuel Resinas, andAntonio Ruiz-Corte´sUniversidad de Sevilla, Spain{adeladelrio,resinas,aruiz}@us.escristina.cabanillas@wu.ac.atAbstract. A key aspect in any process-oriented organisation is the mea-surement of process performance for the achievement of its strategicand operational goals. Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a keyasset to carry out this evaluation, and, therefore, the management ofthese PPIs throughout the whole BP lifecycle is crucial. In this demowe present PPINOT Tool Suite, a set of tools aimed at facilitating andautomating the PPI management. The support includes their definitionusing either a graphical or a template-based textual notation, their auto-mated analysis at design-time, and their automated computation basedon the instrumentation of a Business Process Management System.1 Defining and Analysing PPIs with PPINOTPerformance requirements on business processes (BPs) are usually specified interms of Process Performance Indicators (PPIs), which are quantifiable metricsthat can be measured directly by data that is generated within the process flowand are aimed at evaluating the efficiency and effectiveness of business process.The management of those PPIs is, thus, an important part of the BP lifecyclethat includes at least the definition of PPIs, their analysis to find relationshipsbetween them, the instrumentation of the information systems that support theBPs in order to take the measures that are necessary to calculate the PPIs, theactual calculation of the PPIs during process execution, and the monitoring ofthe PPIs fulfillment.The PPINOT Metamodel [1] provides a foundation on which an automatedsupport for these activities can be built. It identifies the concepts that are nec-essary for defining Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) such as the different? This work was partially supported by the European Commission (FEDER), theSpanish and the Andalusian R&D&I programmes (grants TIN2009-07366 (SETI),TIN2012-32273 (TAPAS), TIC-5906 (THEOS)). The authors thank the PPINOTdevelopment team at the ISA group, for their development work; concretely AnaBele´n Sa´nchez and Edelia Garc´ıa.types of measures that can be used to compute the PPI value. It was definedto address the challenge of providing PPI definitions that are unambiguous andcomplete, traceable to the business process elements used in their definition, in-dependent of the language used to model business processes (BP) and amenableto automated analysis.Two notations have been developed on top of the PPINOT Metamodel,namely a graphical notation and a template-based textual notation [2]. Theformer extends BPMN to allow the graphical definition of PPIs together withtheir corresponding BPs. The latter provides a template for PPIs and a set oflinguistic patterns the user must follow to make the PPI definition easier [2].Figure 1 shows an example of a PPI defined using PPINOT. The left handside corresponds to a template-based definition, the right hand side depicts thecorresponding XML serialisation of the PPINOT Metamodel.Fig. 1. An example of a PPI defined with PPINOTThe PPINOT Metamodel is also provided with formal semantics based onDescription Logics (DL). This enables leveraging reasoning operations imple-mented by off-the-shelf DL reasoners to automatically extract information fromthe relationships between PPIs and BP elements. This information can be usedto assist process analysts in the definition and instrumentation of PPIs [1].In this paper, we give an overview of the PPINOT Tool Suite, which is a setof tools based on the PPINOT Metamodel that automate or facilitate some ofthe aforementioned PPI management activities.2 PPINOT Tool Suite OverviewFigure 2 overviews the tools that compose the PPINOT Tool Suite. Rectanglesdepict tools, their inputs and outputs are represented by documents linked withdashed arrows, and the possible interconnections between tools is done by usingsolid arrows. The tools can be used separately or sequentially, depending on theuser purposes. In the following we describe a possible way to use it.Design. The PPINOT Tool Suite offers two different ways to define PPIs. Onthe one hand, we can define them graphically together with the BPMN repre-sentation of the BP using the PPINOT Graphical Editor, which is a web editorBusinessProcess EditorPPINOT Templates EditorPPINOT AnalyserPPINOT Graphical EditorBPMS PPINOT InstrumenterPPINOT ReporterCEPPPI DatabaseBP+PPI XMLUsersProcess ResponsibleProcess ResponsibleProcess Designer!"#$%&'(&)*+#$#',-"./01&'Fig. 2. PPINOT Tool Suite Overviewthat has been implemented as an extension of the Oryx platform [3]. On theother hand, we can use the PPINOT Templates Editor to define PPIs using thetemplate-based textual notation. The tool guides the user by providing linguis-tic patterns according to the selection performed in the different fields. In bothcases, an XML document with the PPI information together with the BP modelis obtained as output.Analysis. After defining the PPIs, the PPINOT Analyser can be used. It uses theDL formalisation of PPINOT metamodel to implement the analysis operationsthat obtain information about the way PPIs and BP elements influence eachother. Concretely, two kinds of analysis operations are currently supported: (I)BPElements involved, which allows answering the question Given a PPI, Whichare the process model’s elements involved?. This information is useful for instancewhen a PPI must be replaced with others (maybe because it is very costly toobtain its value) and it is necessary to assure that every element of the BP thatwas measured before is measured in the new case; and (II) PPIs associated toBPElement, which allows answering the question Given a BPElement, Whichare the PPIs associated or applied to it?. This information can assist during theevolution of BPs (e.g., an activity is deleted) to identify which PPIs will beaffected and should be updated.Execution. The last set of tools that can be used are those focused on theexecution of the BP. Before execution, the PPINOT Instrumenter configuresActiviti (an open source BPMS1) to send events to a Complex Event Processor(CEP) and also configures the CEP to compute the values of the defined PPIs1 http://activiti.org.from the events generated by Activiti during BP execution. The computed valuesof the PPIs are stored in a PPI Database. Finally, the PPINOT Reporter canbe used to present the user these values2.Further information about PPINOT Tool Suite, the description of the toolsand user instructions can be found at http://www.isa.us.es/ppinot.3 Significance and FeaturesPPINOT Tool Suite has been developed from research results, and validated andextended thanks to the feedback obtained from several real scenarios, both fromorganisations and academia. To the best of our knowledge, there not exists anysimilar tool for the definition and design-time analysis of PPIs. Concretely, wecan highlight the following features, from which the last four provide the noveltyto our proposal:BPMN 2.0 compliant. PPIs can be defined over BP diagrams (BPDs) pre-viously modelled using the de facto standard BPMN 2.0.PPI values computation Taking as starting point any of the aforementionedPPI definitions, PPINOT also provides the possibility to extract the infor-mation required to calculate PPI values from Activiti, an open source BPmanagement platform, and to create reports with these values.Graphical definition of PPIs. PPINOT Tool Suite supports the graphicaldefinition of PPIs using a graph-based graphical notation that is easily un-derstandable by non-technical users, at the same time that it is supportedby a metamodel that assures the precise and complete definition of PPIs.Template-based definition of PPIs. PPIs can be defined by fulfilling tem-plates written in structured natural language, where the user only has toproperly introduce the missing information, assisted by linguistic patterns.PPI definition mapping Graphical definition of PPIs can be mapped to theircorresponding templates in natural language.Automated analysis of PPIs. The aforementioned analysis operations canbe automatically performed on PPI definitions.References1. del R´ıo-Ortega, A., Resinas, M., Cabanillas, C., Ruiz-Corte´s, A.: On the Definitionand Design-time Analysis of Process Performance Indicators. Information Systems38(4) (2012) 470–4902. del R´ıo-Ortega, A., Resinas, M., Dura´n, A., Ruiz-Corte´s, A.: Defining process per-formance indicators by using templates and patterns. In: Proc. of the 10th Interna-tional Conference on Business Process Management (BPM). (2012) 223–2283. Decker, G., Overdick, H., Weske, M.: Oryx - an open modeling platform for thebpm community. In: Proc. of the 6th International Conference on Business ProcessManagement (BPM). (2008) 382–3852 In its current version this tool provides a simple list of values. An extension toprovide a proper report is planned.

PPINOT Tool Suite:  a Performance Management Solution for Process-Oriented Organisations

Adela del-Río-Ortega

Cristina Cabanillas

Manuel Resinas

Antonio Ruiz-Cortés

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PPINOT Tool Suite: A Performance Management Solution for Process-Oriented Organisations

https://idus.us.es/xmlui/bitstream/handle/11441/26294/file_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

PPINOT Tool Suite: a Performance Management Solution for Process-Oriented Organisations

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