Advanced Business Process Management in Networked E-Business Scenarios

Information System is one of the key domain in which lot of research has been done in the past few years. Applying Information systems to heterogeneous and distributed environments is one of the current research areas. Business Process Management Systems is the information systems which deal with the administration of tasks in the business processes, organizational structures, or in the related context. The Workflow Management system, the early idea of BPM, controls the workflow in an organization, data transfer, and integration of legacy information systems with existing programs and program modules, delegation of business tasks. Offering task management services especially modeling of business processes and underlying organizations, BPM serves it meaning and incorporates the WFM system. BPM supporting the use of knowledge concerning the awareness/unawareness of integrated software, and analysis of processes and organizational structure in terms of verification, modification, evaluation are key management in BPM system I.INTRODUCTION TO BPM: Combination of corporate restructuring and mergers urged the department and processes to be automated and linked together. Unfortunately it created largely disconnected spaghetti of systems and applications. Business Process Management (BPM) was born from a strong need to streamline internal processes and connections between both internal and external functions. It provides ability to model, monitor, manage and manipulate processes quickly in response to changes in strategy and market forces. BPM is an extension of classical Work Flow Management (WFM) systems and approaches. BPM delivers the maximum utility of legacy system. It is a method for revolutionizing the way the work moves throughout an organization. II.COMPONENTS OF BPM: The four key elements in Business Process Management are: Process modeling, Process rule, Process management, and Process performance analytics. Process modeling: Process modeling describes the flow of information (business process).It helps in building a model of process and mapping into an implementation frame work. Modeling requires a consistent analysis and representation of the processes. It forms the basis for the userspecific process environment. Process Rule: Process Rule is a heart of the BPM. It involves execution of discrete steps & integration of information. A process rules engine is used for this purpose. The engine is to monitor and manage the given steps by providing a flow control over the business process. If a process fails or delayed, a compensated action can be done to rectify. Process Management: Process Management is to correlate business/application events to fundamental business metrics .It enables the organization to monitor and optimize the business process. Once the process has been analyzed, modeled and the associated rules are formed. The next stage involves the visualization and management. Visualization means transaction data ranging from holistic to process-state or client state specific rules. Process Performance Analytics: Process Performance Analytics is a transition data source available for sophisticated management analytics .This data should be available on a retrospective or real-time basis. It should answer to one of the most difficult question like “how much does it cost to process a specific transaction?” By this way BPM mainly addresses four components. They are Work Flow Management, Content and records management Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) and Business Activity monitoring (BAM). III.RELEVENCE TO SYSTEM INTEGRATION: BPM can be fitted easily on the top of existing IT system. It is the Process rules that governs all the happenings and optimizes the process. BPM will not be able to work without the connectivity provided by the EAI layer. EAI layer provides BPM to gain and measure the value from the investment. On the other hand, BPM provides value to the EAI technology layer of Information technology. BPM layer offers business management the view of the message processing layer. It is used to unlock the value of the information held in the integration layer. It is also used to gather data of every transaction in the lifecycle. IV.APPLICATION OF BPM: BPM can be applied to any application which needs these advantages. BPM reduces unnecessary high losses in time critical transactions, helps to provide any critical information, practical application yield fast ROI ,better control over the information, identifying and maximizing the benefits faster, better analysis and tracking, provides enterprise-wide visibility of business processes, improve the effectiveness of the core operations, provides ability to coordinate interactions between information systems, business process and the people, flexible and easily changed by non-technical business people.

Current worldwide economy conditions cause increasing popularity of collaborative business networks. Dealing with multiple organizations and multiple processes within a complicated network, identifying and locating a member that has a responsibility and/or a competence in a particular part of the network can be a laborious, time-consuming process. Knowledge management technology is aimed to assist in solving this problem. It requires intelligent interoperability support between information systems of collaborative network members. A presented approach is based on the context management technology. It allows allows describing the collaborative network at a particular moment. The context includes such current situation properties as time, location, competence profiles of collaborative network members, etc. The competence profiles allow formalizing and sharing member's knowledge and competencies.

Introduction. In the context of modern challenges and needs of the global business environment, effective management of business processes and ensuring economic security are extremely important for the success of IT enterprises. This article examines the key aspects of economic security and business process management in the context of information technology, enabling analysis, evaluation, and optimization of enterprise activities in this sector. Research Objective. Studying key aspects of economic security and business process management in the context of their optimization in the IT sector, as well as researching methods of business process management and providing practical recommendations that can be useful for IT enterprises to improve their efficiency and competitiveness. Method (methodology). The research methodology involves literature analysis, empirical studies, and the use of analytical, synthesis, modeling, and forecasting methods to gain a deeper understanding of economic security and business process management in the IT sector. General scientific techniques have been utilized, including the analysis of scientific literature addressing issues of economic security and business process management. Empirical studies include the analysis of practical situations in the IT sector, allowing for the examination of specific cases of success or challenges in the field of economic security and business process management. This combination of methods will enable a comprehensive analysis and provide recommendations for improving practices in the IT sector. The results. The research methodology encompasses literature analysis, empirical studies, and the utilization of analysis, synthesis, modeling, and forecasting methods to gain a deeper understanding of economic security and business process management in the IT sector. Empirical research involves analyzing practical situations in the IT sector, allowing for the examination of specific cases of success or challenges in the realm of economic security and business process management. This combination of methodologies enables a comprehensive analysis and provides recommendations for improving business process management practices within the context of economic security in the IT sector Conclusions. The issues of achieving economic security status by IT businesses have been studied and summarized, taking into account their specificities. Methods for assessing the effectiveness of business process management through the use of indicator systems adapted to the IT industry have been generalized. Suggestions have been made for developing performance indicators for IT enterprise business processes to enhance management practices and ensure stability and competitiveness of IT companies within the context of economic security.

Nowadays, the problem in business process management (BPM) is that BPM systems should both be easy to use for business process developers and be based on a sound formal method. Business process management systems are often based on semiformal modeling techniques such as event-driven process chains (EPC) or UML. Unlike semiformal modeling techniques, the process calculus CSP comes with mature verification sup- port. Surprisingly little work has been done on using CSP for business process modeling and management. In this paper, we present our approach to business process management, which is based on the observation that CSP is well suited not only for specifying business processes and verifying work???ows but also for executing work???ows using our CSP4J framework. We report on a work???ow server, which is specified in CSP and implemented using our CSP4J framework. The server accepts work???ows that are modeled in CSP and also implemented using CSP4J. This allows us to integrate the mature verification support of CSP into both the management system itself and the development process of the end users’ business process definitions.

Organizations must comply with a number of external and internal regulations for business governance and must ensure that their processes are running accordingly to requirements of regulations. Therefore business process and regulations compliance analysis audit and management tasks take a very important role in daily operational activities for each organization. Due to high complexity this task can become challenging. In some domains regulations are changing rapidly. Process models must be flexible and easy adjustable to changing requirements, since the lack of ability to comply with regulations can lower down the competitiveness of an organizations. Thus, rapid changes of regulations require rapid changes of related business processes. The goal of the PhD work is to develop business process and regulations compliance management technology which should enable business process construction from regulations and change monitoring of regulations and business processes to ensure easy and rapid modification of business process model or regulations, thus also ensuring compliance.

In the modern business scenario, organizations are vesting high efforts in managing process sustainability as part of their operations management practices. The global environmental concerns for the welfare of the society have facilitated this change. Research studies have reported Information and Communication Technology (ICT) as one of the prerequisites in developing and maintaining efficient business processes. The process sustainability related initiatives and various processes related regulatory compliances have created the need for sophisticated IT tools like BPM (Business Process Management) and BI (Business Intelligence) in organizations. Thus with the advancement of ICT, a strong desire to enhance the business process performance through BPM and BI applications is felt across organizations. However, there is scant research available on leveraging the advantages of these applications in sustainability development. Therefore, this paper aims to present a conceptual architecture framework using an integrated BPM and BI solution to develop an orientation among practitioners and academicians towards the inclusion of ICT in attaining a sustainable, energy efficient business operations or processes. The framework is based on the literature pertaining to the role of BPM and BI in process sustainability as well as from the inputs of practitioners involved in the field of BPM and BI.

Nowadays, organisations use business process management (BPM) around the world to maintain a competitive advantage related to their business processes (BP). In this sense, business process improvement implies often a challenge in identifying specific improvement metrics according to the BP types, which from different scenarios. Thus, we present in this paper an integrated approach for defining improvement metrics according to the BP types. Our proposed approach is validated through a case study involving the enhancement of a BP. This BP is about requests for compensation within an airline company. Our approach consists of three main pillars: 1) management BP metrics; 2) operational BP metrics; 3) support BP metrics. In order to identify appropriate improvement interventions, modelling, analysis, simulation, monitoring and process mining techniques are used.

The management of processes and systems is a complex and time-consuming activity for organizations and also an ongoing Information Technology (IT) challenge. Among the different approaches for bringing flexibility to the business processes and systems are Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Business Process Management (BPM). The SOA approach has become popular providing services and interfaces, enabling integration of heterogeneous and distributed platforms and BPM leverages the cycles of improvements, control and evaluation of business processes. BPM and SOA should work together aiming at improving business processes and evolving systems architecture. One main problem to apply BPM and SOA is the lack of established processes and this work proposes a software process line in order to simplify variability control and enable the instantiation of new development process applying BPM and SOA. It also aims at developing an environment to support the proposed software process line in order to automate the process, integrating industrial tools with one specifically developed to perform the transformation of UMA models into BPM notation. The main contribution of this work is the definition of the software process line for engineering service-oriented products. It is highly relevant to software industry since software process lines lacks experiments, practices and tools.

A company's competitiveness relies heavily on its business processes and accurate knowledge to execute its business processes with agility and efficiency. Business Process Management (BPM) initially promised to provide the business world with suitable tools and techniques for successful BPM without help from the IT world. However, the current practice of BPM has several fundamental problems, including difficulty with automatic discovery and the integration of business processes across organizations. Understanding that the main cause of these problems lies in the lack of semantics on business process, we first define a variety of business process ontologies in order to build a semantic business process space (SBPS) for the limited area of sales order. We then explain how the SBPS satisfies the requirements for successful implementation of semantic BPM (SBPM) and demonstrate with a scenario how SBPM can be realized in the environment of SBPS. Our novel approach will reduce the time and cost necessary for the development of a new business process in a fast-changing environment and provide practitioners with useful insights into the proper implementation of the SBPM. Although our paper defines semantic business process knowledge for only a limited domain, its insights can be readily extended to other areas of business.

In order for enterprises to collaborate at the business-process level, they must deal with two kinds of processes: the public conversation processes specifying inter-enterprise document flows, and the private business processes specifying local workflows of document manipulation and other related tasks. The provisioning, interaction and integration of conversation management and business process management, have become the common interest of the e-business (electronic business) industry. We discuss the relationship and interaction between conversation management and business process management; point out the difference between public conversation processes (e.g. BPSS processes) and peer-conversation processes (e.g. BPEL4WS processes). We then illustrate our collaborative process management system that has functionally separated conversation manager and business process manager. The conversation manager is based on the ebXML (Extensible Markup Language) BPSS (Business Process Execution Language) standard; it is used for validating document exchange at run-time and for activating corresponding process tasks. We have also proposed the conversation model driven asynchronous task activation mechanism for interaction between a conversation process and the coupled business process dynamically. With this mechanism, generic APIs (application program interfaces) between the conversation manager and the business process manager can be easily defined and used by multiple plugged-in conversation managers.

In the past few decades, the recognition and adoption of Business Process Management (BPM) has increased at a phenomenal pace. Organizations are increasingly devoting resources towards development and use of BPM techniques and technologies to model, analyze, improve and implement business processes. However, the existing procedures for collecting information to create business process models generally lead to misunderstanding or ambiguity between model and domain experts. We propose a framework to automate collection of such information and build models directly from users' inputs captured through interactive web-forms. The framework also allows users to align processes with strategic business objectives, critical success factors, key performance indicators and functions. Further, processes can be tagged with appropriate maturity level, types and tiers. A dashboard then provides real-time reports which help decision makers to monitor organization's performance, make better decisions, and standardize/optimize processes across the organization.

The aim of the article is to present a framework enabling the quick and practical assessment of the nature of business processes, necessary to select business process management (BPM) tools and methodologies in accordance with the actual nature of BPs in the organization. The lack of such compliance reduces or delays the results, or it can even cause the failure of BPM implementations. To avoid this risk, organizations should be aware of the nature of their processes prior to planning and implementing BPM. The article summarizes extensive literature studies and experiences resulting from the practical implementation of business process management in organizations with diverse types of business processes. Developed in accordance with the Design Science Research (DSR) methodology, the Business Process Nature Assessment Framework (BPNAF) uses an approach that combines business process management with the management of the knowledge used and created in the course of the process execution. The article presents the concept of the business process space and the Business Process Nature Assessment Framework (BPNAF) based thereon, which enables the quick and efficient assessment of the nature of business processes in an organization in terms of their unpredictability and knowledge intensity. The presentation of the results enables the objective recommendation of the selection of implementation methodologies, HRM policies, or IT systems supporting BPM in line with the real nature of business processes implemented in the organization, in a way that is understandable to both specialists and non-specialists. The article is dedicated to researchers, but above all to practitioners using BPM. The application of the presented BPNAF allows managers to choose the methodology and tools supporting the management of business processes, but also human resources or knowledge, in accordance with the objective nature of the processes and the needs of the organization. The simplicity and speed of analysis, as well as the ability to directly use its results in the initial implementation of business process management, mean that the benefits of using the BPNAF are much greater than the effort or preparation costs involved. An important limitation of the work is the fact that the analysis of the business process space and, consequently, the BPNAF are limited to only two dimensions: unpredictability and knowledge-intensity. The article presents the original concept of the business process space and the author's model of the BPNAF framework based on its two-dimensional version. The supplement of BPM implementation methodologies with the use of the results of this work is of key importance for the success or failure of implementations.

Service-oriented architectures, business process management (BPM) systems, and BPM in general receive a lot of attention these days and the number of articles which describe the benefits and great potential of these technologies has significantly increased. It is something like a second wave after the first (and short) workflow hype in the middle of the 90’s. However, the contemporary hype in newspapers and IT magazines does not really reflect reality. In fact, much more companies are still thinking about whether and in which form they shall introduce these technologies rather than concretely performing projects in these fields. And many companies which have started respective projects are still in the phase of designing and implementing (web) services or in evaluating SOA platforms and repositories of different vendors; i.e., they are still not bringing (larger) processes into production. Nevertheless, expectations are very high: Everything will become easier and more flexible, implementation of crossorganizational processes will become business as usual, and process management systems will enable new kinds of process-aware applications which have to be performed manually today. In fact, BPM has a great potential. However, to realize this potential in practice, we have to face much more the challenges of the real world, we have to learn more seriously from how business processes are executed today, and we have to understand how actors deal with exceptional situations. It is not hard to predict what will happen with the current BPM hype if users discover that they cannot do much more with these technologies than with previous ones or, even worse, that they can do less. And no organization will accept to become inflexible. – It is partially up to us, whether BPM will become a big and sustainable success or whether it will share the fate of many other hypes (like Computer Integrated Manufacturing at the end of the 80’s). This talk will present real-world examples from different domains to illustrate where we jump too short. It will use the ADEPT project [1,2] to show how stimulating it can be also from a research point of view to face the reality as it is.

Over the last few years organizations have been dealing with the integration of their business processes and software and technologies to support their realization. One challenge is to unite the vision from business and software areas, to design and implement business processes in a way that allows organizations to react agilely to changes. New paradigms have appeared to support this vision: Business Process Management (BPM), Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) and Model-Driven Development (MDD). BPM deals with managing business process lifecycle from modeling, implementation, execution and evaluation to find improvement opportunities. SOC bases the design and implementation of software on services, which are defined to support business processes. MDD focus is on models, allowing the definition of automatic transformation between them along with code generation for different platforms. In this article we present the main principles for the integration of these paradigms as found in a systematic review carried out with the objective of establishing the bases for our research.KeywordsBusiness process management (BPM)Service-oriented computing (SOC)Model-driven development (MDD)Systematic review

Enterprises in today’s networked economy face numerous information management challenges, both from a process management perspective as well as a decision support perspective. While there have been significant relevant advances in the areas of business process management as well as decision sciences, several open research issues exist. In this paper, we highlight the following key challenges. First, current process modeling and management techniques lack in providing a seamless integration of decision models and tools in existing business processes, which is critical to achieve organizational objectives. Second, given the dynamic nature of business processes in networked enterprises, process management approaches that enable organizations to react to business process changes in an agile manner are required. Third, current state-of-the-art decision model management techniques are not particularly amenable to distributed settings in networked enterprises, which limits the sharing and reuse of models in different contexts, including their utility within managing business processes. In this paper, we present a framework for decision-enabled dynamic process management that addresses these challenges. The framework builds on computational formalisms, including the structured modeling paradigm for representing decision models, and hierarchical task networks from the artificial intelligence (AI) planning area for process modeling. Within the framework, interleaved process planning (modeling), execution and monitoring for dynamic process management throughout the process lifecycle is proposed. A service-oriented architecture combined with advances from the semantic Web field for model management support within business processes is proposed.