A Service-Oriented Architecture for Generating Sound Process Descriptions

In modern economic conditions, each company seeks to increase the level of competitiveness. In this regard, it is necessary to use modern management tools, including those based on information technology. For effective company management, it is necessary to timely examine its business processes. Effective management measures are selected depending on the completeness of the description and modeling of business processes. This article provides a description of business processes, describes the possible strategy and SWOT analysis on the example of car service activities. It is shown that to analyze the current activities of the company, they use the «goal tree», «problem tree», «strategy tree». The proposed company strategy is aimed at increasing the company's profits. SWOT analysis and analysis of the external environment of the company revealed the strengths and weaknesses to improve future activities. Based on a comprehensive analysis business process models in the «as is» and «to be» notations will be developed that will allow company management to assess the state of the companies business processes before and after their improvement. Such a research is aimed at choosing a strategy for improving or reengineering the company activities.

1 IntroductionOrganizations focus on automate their processes in order to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and/or reduce human beings' errors in an easy and rapid manner. Business process management (BPM) methods provide a solution to this issue. In this context, information systems like CRM, ERP, SCM, etc. have known an increasing demand. The main problem consists of the length of the business process specifications. If new regulations appear, these specifications must be adapted. Manually extraction of visual models is time consuming. During time, a series of solutions were proposed. The literature shows a crowd of approaches that extracts data models [1], [2], [3], and process models [4], [5] from Natural Language (NL) text. This paper aims to analyze the Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques and tools used in order to provide different types of visual representations.On the last few years, approaches based on NLP have been developed in order to automate process conversion from NL text. NLP plays an important role in NL text analysis as NLP tries to understand speech and text as humans beings would do. Colloquialism, abbreviations or typos make this task a challenging one. NLP has the origins in 1950s when Alan Turing proposed the Turing test [6], by introducing the imitation game. Since then, the literature shows a plethora of NLP tools [7], [8], [9], [10] using several machine learning techniques, our focus being on those applied on data models and process models discovery from NL text, starting with the first language parser [11] to the actual ones like NLTk [7], [8], ANTLR1, etc.Linguistic analysis is closely tied to NLP. Liddy [12] highlights 7 levels of linguistic analysis: a) Phonetic or Phonological level: how words are pronounced, b) Morphological level: prefixes, suffixes and roots analysis, c) Lexical level: word level analysis including lexical meaning and Part-Of-Speech (POS) analysis, d) Syntactic level: grammatical analysis of words in a sentence, e) Semantic level: determining the possible meanings of sentences, f) Discourse level: interpreting structure and meaning for texts larger than a sentence, g) Pragmatic level: understanding the purpose of a language.Some of the problems approached by NLP are: POS tagging, parsing, Named Entity Recognition (NER), chunking, Semantic Role Labeling (SRL). Anaphora resolution [13] refers to the interpretation of the link between the anaphor and its antecedents.The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: Section 2 briefly outlines the NLP domain, describing the levels of linguistic analysis and the main NLP approaches of analyzing NL requirements. Section 3 focuses on data and process models extraction from NL text. This section makes an introduction to Object Oriented Analysis and Business Process Modeling and analyses the existing tools that discover data and process models from text. Subsequently, Section 4 summarizes the results of this work and the conclusions are drawn in Section 5.2NLPA detailed review on NLP is given in [14] and in [15]. Jones [14] divides the history of NLP into four phases: the first starts at the beginning of the 1940s and lasts to the late 1960s, the second begins from the end of 60s and lasts to the end of 70s, the third is represented by late 80s, where the fourth phase starts in the late of 90s. Next, we will detail each phase as they were defined in [14] and [15]. First phase treated machine translation issues, while the second focused on artificial intelligence. The third phase can be called grammatico-logical phase, which is followed by the lexical phase. A fifth phase is proposed in [16] where formal theories and statistical data are combined. Since this study was published first in 1994 and then it was re-organized in 2001 we can add the sixth phase: from 2000 until present where NLP techniques are combined in order to contribute to visual models extraction.Software requirements are usually written in NL which is asymmetric and irregular [17]. …

Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model

This paper presents experiences in applying the goal decomposition and scenario analysis model in the context of Business Process Reengineering (BPR). The relationships of goals, scenarios, as well as the understanding and description of business processes are discussed. Different methods of goal refinement, and the application of scenarios to support this process of refining goals and roles are reviewed. A case study is presented which serves to exemplify and validate the process of using scenarios in refining business process descriptions. We tried deriving full scenarios for business processes, but obtaining them from the organization's prescriptive goals was difficult. Explanatory scenarios that justify descriptive goals are easier to obtain but are fragmentary. We conclude that both types of scenario and goal analysis are necessary for effective BPR. The need for technology support for this process is discussed and attention is given to future anticipated research in this area.

Business processes description is traditionally a complex task, requiring involvement of consulting institutions and special training of managers engaged in the description. Poorly formalized management processes are implemented as informal management practices, so their description requires from managers the competencies that exceed their standard skills.The article2 classifies the factors, which help to formalize management business-processes and form the requirements to managers’ competence. The research makes inferences that business processes have an urgent need for description; reveals the problems of business processes management; determines the requirements for managers’ competence; elaborates quantitative and qualitative parameters of managers’ participation in competitions. The study shows, that knowledge formalization is carried out with the direct implementation of the company’s policy that is aimed at establishing and developing personnel’s scientific communication, revealing its creativity. The description of business processes management helps to regulate the requirements to managers’ competence as the ability to knowledge formalization, as well as to form competencies of the development of business processes description as the method of informal knowledge formalizing; the expansion of functional roles managers employed in the description of business processes and identifying the prospects of knowledge formalization under present conditions.

Enterprise management systems are complex and large information systems which support business processes of an enterprise. This entails dealing with issues such as the precedence between tasks and activities within a process, as well as resources, roles and enterprise assets involved. These characteristics state that the processes modeling phase that compose the system play a relevant role. Both the description and validation of processes are very important because undetected mistakes in this phase will have a negative effect in the upcoming phases and in the final system quality. This paper deals with description and validation of enterprise management process through a framework that combine some technologies that have great acceptation in both software researchers and developers. The framework is based on the paradigm of Model Driven Architecture and is complemented with ontologies which raise the possibilities to semantically validate the business processes.

Business process descriptions are usually stored in internal enterprise repositories. In order to be able to reuse Business Processes (a.k.a. BPs), BP designers require some tools to help them to discover processes (or fragments of processes) in the repository based on these descriptions. In most cases discovery is a difficult task (the diversity of modeling languages, the process descriptions are very close to the IT level being far from the business level, there is a lack of automatic tools, etc.).

The analysis of graphic and formal methods and techniques for description of business processes is conducted. It is revealed the lack of a common approach to information presenting of all business processes lifecycle. The proposed information technology for combining different descriptions in a unit and methods of transition from one description mode to another is not yet possible to implement without loss of information and ensuring all participants of business processes lifecycle in a single conceptual framework. A comprehensive interrelated description of all aspects of business processes is proposed. This description appears in text, image, formal and algorithmic species as different forms of a single process models, which complement each other and can best solve various problems. This approach provides a convenient way of describing the process by specialists of different levels: from the head in the conceptual process design (planning) to direct performer during his work in securing the conditions for monitoring and control process. The basis for the creation of an information technology and software environment for planning, modeling, analysis, support and performance management of business processes is developed.

We investigate abstract common traits of longitudinal processes related to digital and green transformation of business processes, such as LCA analysis, CO2 footprint evaluation, and production cost analysis. The common abstraction allows to develop general tools and joint understanding of the three most relevant analytical processes significant to economic entities: production cost allows the undertaking to stay competitive, while conforming to forthcoming regulation involving either calculation of CO2 footprint (relevant to most value chains in European economy) or LCA analysis of products (relevant to major undertakings that are subject to sustainability reporting regulations). The result is an idea for a domain specific language that describes the concepts to calculate the stated process indicators and describe the data required in these calculations.

Project repositories are a central asset in software development, as they preserve the knowledge gathered in past development activities. Locating relevant information in a vast project repository is problematic, because it requires manually tagging projects with accurate metadata, an activity which is time consuming and prone to errors and omissions. Just like any other artifact or web service, business processes can be stored in repositories to be shared and used by third parties, e.g., as building blocks for constructing new business processes. The success of such a paradigm depends partly on the availability of effective search tools to locate business processes that are relevant to the user purposes. A handful of researchers have investigated the problem of business process discovery using as input syntactical and structural information that describes business processes. This work explores an additional source of information encoded in the form of annotations that semantically describe business processes. Business processes can be semantically described using the so called abstract business processes. These are designated by concepts from an ontology which additionally captures their relationships. This ontology can be built in an automatic fashion from a collection of (concrete) business processes, and this work illustrates how it can be refined by domain experts and used in the discovery of business processes, with the purpose of reuse and increase in design productivity.

Business Process (BP) improvement and alike require accurate descriptions of the BPs. We suggest to describe BPs as use case specifications. A use case specification comprises a description of the context of the BP, the interactions between the agents involved in the BP, the interactions of these agents with an automated system supporting the BP and attached system internal requirements. Constructing such specifications remains a difficult task. Our proposal is to use textual scenarios as inputs, describing fragments of the BP, and to guide, using a set of rules, their incremental production and integration in a use case specification also presented in a textual form. The paper presents the structure of a use case, the linguistic approach adopted for textual scenarios analysis and the guided process for constructing use case specifications from scenarios along with the guidelines and support rules grounding the process. The process is illustrated with a real case study borrowed to an Electricity Company.

The essence and legal bases of internal audit in works of scientists are investigated. The principles of organization of internal audit of the main activity in banks are studied. The article describes the main organization principles of internal audit of the main activity in banks: planning, responsibility, continuity, complexity, the unity of approaches, and efficiency. The functioning peculiarities of the algorithm of the internal audit as the main operational activity of the bank using the graph-analytic method are determined. The article provides the components of the internal audit of the main operational activity of the bank: subject, control actions and object. The concept of the activity of the internal audit unit of the bank is singled out. The author investigates the composition of control actions in the internal audit of the main operational activity of the bank in detail: the organization of the internal audit of the main operational activity, the method of internal audit of the main operating activity and the result of internal audit of the main operating activity. The article describes the components of the concept of the bank internal audit unit activity: mission, goals, strategy, the organizational structure, the description of business processes and procedures, and the corporate culture. The purpose and main tasks of internal audit of the main operational activity of the bank are examined. The features of the methodological basis of internal audit of the main operational activity of the bank are distinguished.

Currently, for the effective development of the activities of any company, modern information technologies and information systems are used. In the conditions of digitalization of the economy, special attention is paid to business processes of interaction with customers of companies, the main requirement of which is the mobility of the proposed operations and services. The use of modern tools to improve business processes is designed to increase the efficiency of any company. Depending on the scope of the company, different tools are used. In this regard, it is advisable to describe and analyze the activities of the company, and then its business processes. The result a list of business processes requiring improvement will be.This paper discusses the features and methods of automating business processes using digital technologies, analyzes the activities of the company (using the example of a travel agency), describes its main business processes. The theoretical and methodological description of the features of automation of the company showed the possibility of using modern IT tools to increase the competitiveness of the company and the level of customer satisfaction. As a result of the research of the activities of the travel agency «1001 tour», an analysis of external and internal factors affecting the company. Description of business processes showed the need to improve interaction with customers through the introduction of mobile technology. The theoretical significance of the study is to describe the features of improving customer service. The practical significance of this work is due to the possibility of using the results as a basis for developing models of the main business processes in the notions «as is» and «to be», preparing a project for introducing innovations and conducting a preliminary assessment of its economic efficiency.

Manual extraction of business process models from technical documentation is a time-consuming task. Several approaches to generating such process models have been proposed. We present a proposal of a new method for extracting business process from natural language text through intermediate process model using the spreadsheet-based representation. Such intermediate model is transformed into a valid BPMN process model. Our method is enhanced with semantic analysis of the text, allows for quick check of the transformation result and manual correction during this process. As the obtained BPMN model is structured, it is easier to check its correctness.

Semi-automated development of conceptual models from natural language text