English

Companies increasingly adopt process management systems (PrMS), which offer promising perspectives for a more flexible and efficient process execution. However, for many process-aware application systems (e.g., ERP or CRM systems), the underlying process logic is still hard-coded. As a consequence, these business applications are both complex to design and costly to maintain; i.e., they require long development cycles, and even simple process changes might result in costly code adaptions and high efforts for testing. One reason for this situation stems from the fact that contemporary PrMS were primarily designed for the support of highly structured, repetitive business processes. By contrast, many processes found in practice are rather unstructured or semi-structured, i.e., they are knowledge-intensive and driven by user decisions. In addition, the business functions to be integrated with these processes usually cannot be straight-jacketed into activities. For all these reasons, the activity-centered paradigm of contemporary PrMS is by far too inflexible for realizing more advanced business applications. This deficiency mainly stems from the unsatisfactory integration of processes and data in existing PrMS. Despite emerging approaches, which target at a tighter integration of process and data, a unified and comprehensive understanding of the relationships between them is still missing. This thesis first analyzes real processes not adequately supported by existing PrMS and elaborates their characteristic properties. As a major insight it became clear that in many application scenarios comprehensive process support requires both object- and process-awareness. This means, business processes and business data must not be treated independently from each other. Instead, business processes must comply with the underlying data structure. In particular, in accordance to the given data model comprising object types and object relations, the modeling, execution and monitoring of processes must be based on two levels of granularity: object behavior and object interactions. Further, the individual processes, coordinating the behavior of single object instances, must be coordinated with the ones of related object instances. Opposed to these well-defined process support granularity levels, activities must be executable at different levels of granularity. In particular, while a particular user may only want to work on a particular object instance, another one may want to process a number of related object instances in one go. Furthermore, process execution must be accomplished in a data-driven manner; i.e., the progress of a process instance mainly depends on available business objects and on value changes of their attributes. Finally, authorized users must be able to access and manage process-related objects at any point in time. Based on the properties identified, this thesis elaborates major requirements for enabling object-awareness in processes management systems. The major contribution of the thesis is the PHILharmonicFlows framework, which addresses these requirements and enables object-aware process management in a comprehensive manner. In particular, the framework not only provides a new process modeling approach, but also establishes a well-defined operational semantics enabling the automatic and dynamic generation of end-user components for object- and process-aware business applications at run-time (e.g., overview tables and user forms). Overall, a holistic framework integrating data, processes and users offers promising perspectives in order to overcome the numerous limitations of contemporary PrMS. This thesis considers research in this area as fundamental maturation of process management technology.

The development of the agricultural sector of Ukraine is an important task today, despite the military actions and their negative impact on the functioning of the national economy and its constituent sectors. The agricultural sphere of Ukraine remains in the status of the world's breadbasket, despite the blockade of seaports, large-scale destruction of agricultural machinery and infrastructure, and a temporary decrease in the volume of production of agricultural products. After all, the development of the agrarian sphere shapes the food and economic security of not only our country. This study aims to determine the role of digital transformations in ensuring an innovative system of managing business processes in the agricultural sector under the conditions of war and post-war recovery. The losses of Ukraine's agricultural economy due to the war's consequences in 2022 have been studied. It has been proven that in order to overcome crises in the agrarian sphere as a result of the war in Ukraine and to form an innovative system of managing business processes in the agrarian sphere, the development of the digital economy and digital transformations, which involve changes in the system of managing business processes based on integration, are essential digital tools and due to the review of strategic guidelines, mechanisms, and functioning models. The tasks of agricultural development, relevant business processes, and digital tools for achieving tasks are systematized. The chain of digital tracking of agro-food products is analyzed. It has been proven that digital transformations have a positive effect on the organization and conduct of agricultural business in Ukraine, change its marketing strategies and marketing activities, the structure of resource provision, reduce production costs and increase the efficiency of economic activity, simplify the methods of forming, transmitting, and storing reporting information. Russia's aggression against Ukraine created crisis conditions for the national economy and the agricultural sector. The number of indirect losses to the agriculture of Ukraine because of the war in 2022 is estimated at 23.3 billion US dollars. Despite the crisis conditions caused by the war, the agrarian sphere of Ukraine plays a vital role in ensuring national food and economic security, and the potential of its development preserves the status of Ukraine as a world granary. In order to restore the functioning of the agrarian sphere of Ukraine, it is necessary to continue the development of the vector of digitalization of the economy, which involves changes in the management system of business processes that take place based on the integration of digital tools and due to the revision of strategic guidelines, mechanisms and models of functioning. Accelerating the development of digital transformations in the management system of business processes in the agrarian sphere will also ensure the European integration guidelines of Ukraine in the context of forming common values regarding the quality and safety of agri-food products. Keywords: the agricultural sector, business processes, business process management, digital transformation, digital tools.

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.

Traditional information systems struggle with the requirement to provide flexibility and process support while still enforcing some degree of control. Accordingly, adaptive Process Management Systems (PMSs) have emerged that provide some flexibility by enabling dynamic process changes during runtime. Based on the assumption that these process changes are recorded explicitly, we present two techniques for mining change logs in adaptive PMSs; that is, we do not only analyse the execution logs of the operational processes, but also consider the adaptations made at the process instance level. The change processes discovered through process mining provide an aggregated overview of all changes that happened so far. Using process mining as an analysis tool we show in this paper how better support can be provided for truly flexible processes by understanding when and why process changes become necessary.

Анотація. За останні роки ситуація істотно змінилася: ринкова система управління змінила адміністративну, підприємства і окремі працівники отримали доступ до досягнень технологічної, електронної та інформаційної революцій, вступили в конкурентні відносини. В результаті змін, що відбулися сучасні підприємства отримали не тільки нові можливості, але й численні проблеми, які потребують реалізації структурних змін в вигляді реінжинірингу бізнес-процесів відповідно до вимог домінуючих економічних, технологічних і соціальних тенденцій розвитку сучасної економіки.
 Використання реінжинірингу в якості основи для розробки моделі адміністрування бізнес-процесів підприємства вимагає докорінного перегляду традиційних основ побудови підприємства і його організаційної культури. Такі суттєві зміни вимагають використання, як спеціальних принципів, так і певних організаційних та економічних умов. Особливої актуальності в рамках розроблюваної моделі адміністрування представляє перепроектування внутрішньої структури управління бізнес-процесів для сучасних підприємств, що знаходяться в кризовому або передкризовому стані.
 Метою даної статті є формування реінжинірингових механізмів в системі управління бізнес-процесами підприємств в сучасних вимогах світових стандартів ринку.
 Підґрунтям для формування ефективної системи виробничих процесів є спеціальне програмне забезпечення (реінжинірингові механізми) організації спільної роботи в локаціях підприємства. За допомогою ефективної організації системи виробничих процесів, використовуючи засоби електронних повідомлень та процес маршрутизації, існує можливість організувати прямий обмін інформаціє про результати роботи між учасниками бізнес-процесу. Функції контролювання за виконанням бізнес-процесу належать керівництву підприємства, з обов’язковою участю підрядників для завершення повного автоматизованого виробничого циклу.
 Авторами в статті детально розглянуто процес використання ІТ-технологій в процесі формування реінжинірингових механізмів в системі управління бізнес-процесами підприємств. В статті визначено відмінність формування реінжинірингових механізмів в системі управління бізнес-процесами підприємств та автоматизації їх діяльності.
 У статті виокремлено, що формування реінжинірингових механізмів в системі управління бізнес-процесами підприємств характеризується: чітко визначеним початком і кінцем; впливом зовнішніх факторів, які або пов'язують його з іншими бізнес-процесами на підприємстві, або описують вихід у зовнішнє середовище; послідовність виконання функцій та правила їх виконання (ділові правила).
 Ключові слова: реінжиніринг, підприємства, бізнес-процеси, IT-технології, управління, реінжиніринговий механізм.

The increase in interest in supporting organization to gain a competitive edge in a rapidly changing market environment necessitates considering means to handle business process changes. This paper is focused on approaches of flexible business process management and attempts to address variation issue encountered in adapting run-time business processes to dynamic changes. A survey of the classification of variation types and the underlying variation strategies is described. These variation strategies can be constructed using the form of ECA rule to allow business processes to be automatically changed on request during their execution. Since considering the benefits brought by knowledge-based technology, a variation repository can be built on valuable experience about how to handle past variation cases and hence enable the current variation problems to be resolved intelligently. In order to implement the proposed approach, variation knowledge-based flexible business process management system extends the underlying architecture of workflow management coalition's reference system. The overall architecture of the extended system is provided.

In conditions of improving production processes, the organization and implementation of a quality management system is one of the most important issues in the management system of individual business processes and the organization as a whole. The formation and implementation of control over the organization of production, product quality, labor protection and other business processes and management objects is carried out in accordance with the accumulated theoretical, methodological and practical experience. However, at present, in the conditions of intensive development of technologies that allow us to move to a qualitatively new level of production, traditionally established approaches to managing business processes are losing their relevance and require additions, including in terms of enhancing the automation of information support for the quality management system. Therefore, as part of this study, it is proposed to pay attention to the development of tools of intelligent quality management systems in terms of performing control and analytical tasks.

This paper investigates options to access the resilience of business process architectures, thereby connecting the two hitherto unconnected areas of Business Process Management and Information System Resilience. The overarching goal is to provide for robust and reliable business process execution even under adverse and unexpected situations. Specifically, this paper focuses on one particular resilience indicator as a basis for assessment, namely time. This is because timeliness and time behavior of activities in business processes directly mirror effects and impacts of a changing environment on the business process. We develop an approach based on process mining to analyze the event logs generated during the execution of processes which extract probability distributions of a process’s time behavior to model the effects of occured events. A case study substantiates the applicability of the approach.

How can the involvement of employees in process innovation be supported and fostered? In this study, we investigate how the use of business process management systems - tools to design, visualize and document business processes - leads to employees (= users) become more process oriented and thus get engaged in process innovation. Using data from a large-scale survey with 171 participants from the financial industry, we show that BPM system usage mainly drives users' involvement in process innovation implementation and championing but less in the true idea generation. Thus, our study contributes to the IT benefits literature in shifting the focus to individual use and 'softer', but yet highly important outcome dimensions (process innovation).

Business processes are essential components of all enterprises and the use of models, languages and execution engines as components of a Business Process Management (BPM) deployment are now commonplace. By definition, these processes describe an enterprise in terms of its organizational knowledge, structure and activities, and are often essential to realizing an organization's competitive advantage. It thus follows that the design, execution and, critically, responsiveness to change in the system or environment they are affecting, is of prime significance toward establishing and maintaining efficient business operation. Deploying a high quality and effective Business Process Management System (BPMS) is thus utterly essential to many modern enterprises. Yet current trends toward flexible methods of working, just-in-time organizational reaction times, distributed intra-organization and interorganization collaboration and constantly changing markets are creating new and complex business landscapes. This brings about increased complexity, further motivating the need for real-time dynamic change throughout an enterprise's business processes; ever more dynamic environments require key business processes to be more flexible and automated in both their design and behaviour. Yet many companies are now discovering that investments in conventional BPMS often suffers from poor return on investment due to a common inability to create business process models that are both meaningful to business people and capable of offering the real-time process flexibility and rapid process adaptation required to cope effectively with the fluid business conditions typifying many modern enterprises. As evidenced by our work with customers in the manufacturing domain, there is very often a need to alter executing process structures, sometimes in real-time, without perturbing the integrity of running process instances. If a BPMS is not built to innately support change in this manner the result can be reductions in both dependability and visibility, especially from a management perspective. Our observation is that many of the current procedural approaches to BPM are too inflexible and unresponsive to change, especially in any automated fashion. In fact many BPMS solutions provide only design-time modelling, with neither support for run-time determination of process structure, nor direct execution of industry standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) process models without the need for first translating BPMN into intermediary formats, such as the Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), in preparation for execution. In practice, these issues imply that process models can tend to become overly complex and brittle through the necessity of coding-in all O pe n A cc es s D at ab as e w w w .in te ch w eb .o rg

The models suggested at present have certain application conditions and ranges, and most of them are not able to satisfy the requirements of complicated and volatile application environments. This paper presents a method based on stochastic Petri nets (SPNs) that evaluates component software reliability at the early stages of software development. The reliability model built with that method can describe the process of dynamic changes of software well and it also considers the factors that affect software reliability by analyzing the characteristic of software architecture. The major drawback of SPN models is the state space explosion with increasing model complexity. In this paper, the problem is resolved by the decomposition of software architecture and one kind of decomposition technique introduced by Koriem (1999). Finally, we illustrate and discuss the numerical reliability results obtained from the proposed method. It has been shown that the suggested method provides a powerful means of analyzing software reliability after software running for a period of time.

Permanent change of methods of analytical processing of digital data for objective analysis and adequate decisions based on available information. In the educational process, analytics of significant amounts of data is used to adequately study and understand the data that are continuously generated in the educational sphere for further in-depth analysis to improve management methods that ensure a sufficient level of qualification of students of higher educational institutions. For this purpose, an automated information and reference system of higher education institution management was developed and tested, and on its basis, analytical analysis of the accumulated data flows was carried out. Since analytics is a painstaking process of determining, systematic analysis and interpreting particularly significant patterns from large continuous streams and volumes of data. Analytical data processing is based on innovative methods of intellectual analysis of large amounts of data, such as association, clustering, classification, categorization, correlation, evaluation, forecasting, and analysis in light of current trends and visualization. The purpose of this work is to use predictive analytics to improve the quality of the educational process by providing objective consolidated information to guide higher education institutions in making informed management decisions. This research work mainly focuses on the urgent need to introduce methods of analytical processing of large data flows into the educational management system of the educational institution, and the following strategies are proposed to meet such needs. When implementing automated information and reference system of educational process management, it is necessary to use various components and their functions. In the information and reference system of educational process management, there are various components, such as electronic learning tools, electronic means of providing access to educational content, the use of information technology, various services, etc. This document also focuses on key issues related to the basic components and their functionality in the studied system for processing both dynamic and analytical data. The effective use and processing of analytical educational data by different methods have a significant potential for identifying and forecasting significant accumulated knowledge from educational data, which provides the education management system to recommend appropriate solutions for a flexible planning process that will ensure the quality of educational services for the future.KeywordsEducationInformation systemInformation technologyAnalytical data processingEducational management

The foundation of the Internet of Things (IoT) consists of ubiquitous smart devices, equipped with sensors, actuators and tags, that are connected to the Internet and able to communicate with one another. It is seen as a great opportunity for organizations to improve, innovate, and reinvent their business processes. However, existing Business Process Management (BPM) tools and systems are not fully capable of integrating and utilizing smart devices as business process resources and, thus, are unable to unlock the high joint potential of BPM and the IoT. In this paper, we propose a concept for a service-oriented BPM system architecture which aims at the modeling, implementation, and execution of IoT-aware business processes. Furthermore, we introduce a first software prototype of the architecture as a proof of concept.

The advent of true client/server technology, high speed personal computers, and global access through the Internet is causing the two worlds of the business process and the computer to collide as management demands better information to use in decision-making. This paper will focus on the concept of organizing the business process to fit the goals and objectives of the enterprise, then tailoring the use of computers and software to the people, processes and data in a coherent fashion, enabling management to "see" the business more completely and therefore manage it more effectively. Computer systems are used to store and process enormous amounts of data for various parts of a business; accounting, land, reserves, documents, geotechnical, etc. Reports containing portions of these data are generated for both internal and external purposes and are often stored and processed by computers at the receiving end. Expert systems and application software are used to analyse technical data for reservoir modelling, geological and geophysical analysis and interpretation, land price analysis, and history-based forecasting for economics and planning. The problems facing management in the mineral resource industry relate to the many facets of managing risk in a volatile environment. They must be able to grasp and manipulate complex essential information to ensure the best use of their people, capital and opportunities within the business process they have adopted to achieve their goals and objectives. They want business- process related information that tells them about their own operation and their marketplace. They need reporting methods that tell them about their return on assets, capital, business units, and specific properties. They need to know how they compare to their competition and how the investment community perceives them. People planning, blueprinting, and executing the business process to achieve corporate objectives are at the heart of commerce. The use of computers must facilitate the business process without interfering with, or attempting to replace it. Client/server, Internet, and multimedia technology offer the means to enhance the business process, but only through first defining and understanding the process, then choosing and implementing the most effective combination of computers and software to enable the business process to succeed. Introduction The situation in today's mineral resources industry is one of tremendous growth and change. New players appear daily, old players consolidate, mergers and acquisitions create new superstars and they all need information that is current, relevant and easily digested to stay in the game. The data that form the basis for this information are captured, stored and managed by different parts of each organization for their specific functional needs and for purposes of reporting to management on their activities. Once the data are put into context they become "information." Our industry generates large volumes of data which has spurred the development of electronic means to store and process the data so that it may become information. "Computerization" of the industry began long ago with the development of accounting systems and geophysical systems.

PurposeThis paper aims to study the shortcomings of the business process of credit card department of a multinational bank and to improve the existing business process efficiency and effectiveness through redesigning the process that eliminates bottlenecks and improves service quality.Design/methodology/approachThe research investigates real‐life business process using case study methodology. It collects primary data through interviews of individuals, focus groups and secondary data from the investigation of company documents. It then uses SWOT analysis, Fishbone Diagram, Process Flow Diagram and a number of other tools to analyse and to redesign the existing process.FindingsThe research identifies that the business process of the credit card department of a multinational bank is unnecessarily lengthy and requires eight to nine days to complete from application processing to final account creation and to issue the card. It then designs a to‐be business process for the same business function. The proposed process reduces half of the time of the existing process.Practical implicationsThe proposed business process reduces the cycle time effectively and uses the organisational resources efficiently to achieve better customer satisfaction. It also helps in growing card market share in this highly competitive and profitable segment of consumer products.Originality/valueThis paper illustrates a unique way of investigating an existing business process and designing a new business process that is very efficient and effective. The design process is quite generic which can be applied to other organisations, especially in the banking sector.