Integrating Smart Devices as Business Process Resources – Concept and Software Prototype

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

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.

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.

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.

Purpose. The aim of the article is to identify the key features of the implementation of digital solutions in the business process management system of modern enterprises. Methodology of research. The following research methods were used to achieve the set goal: methods of system analysis (to analyse problems during the planning of the implementation of digital solutions in the business process management system of modern enterprises); methods of scientific abstraction, deduction and induction (for formulating a scientific hypothesis of work, laws and principles), analysis and synthesis – to analyse the state of development of the business process management system of modern enterprises; abstract and logical (for making theoretical generalizations, substantiating research methodology, formulating conclusions). The tabular method clearly reflects the current state of the investigated problem. Findings. It has been established that the transition to a digital economy is based on technologies that define the Fourth Industrial Revolution, which consists of digitization and includes the saturation of the physical world with electronic and digital devices. The study also found that the process of digital transformation of business processes consists of elements such as customer interaction, operational business processes and enterprise models. It is determined that the implementation of digital solutions in each of these parts of the model opens up new opportunities for the development of enterprises. It is substantiated that the introduction of digital solutions in the management of business processes of enterprises has a positive impact on efficiency, flexibility and adaptability to changes in the external environment. It is noted that in order to maintain competitiveness, it is important not only to implement technology, but also to change the corporate culture and adapt employees to new tools. The study also highlights the most common digital solutions that are often implemented by modern enterprises: artificial intelligence, big data, blockchain, Internet of Things and cloud computing, which provide transparency, security and integration in business process management. Originality. A modern systematic overview of the most common digital solutions used to manage business processes at the enterprise has been further developed. Practical value. The results of the study can be useful for business managers and business process management specialists, as they provide a clear idea of the advantages and peculiarities of using digital solutions in the practice of enterprises. Key words: artificial intelligence, blockchain, big data, cloud technologies, fourth industrial revolution, digitalization.

Business process management is the discipline that encompasses the analysis, modelling, implementation, execution, monitoring/control and continuous improvement of business processes. Methods and models developed for this management activity offer wide‐ranging assistance to, and potential for, most organisations, yet even a general awareness of them seems to be non‐existent in many organisations. An empirical study, conducted in the German‐speaking region of Europe, gathered useful data on issues relating to current and future investment in business process management, including initiatives in the field of business process outsourcing. Analysis of that data allows for the critical interpretation of the current viewpoint of this business discipline as well as providing some interesting new insights into applications in use, level of maturity, realised benefits and outsourcing opportunities. A bright future exists for business process management as long as the most significant hurdle, the failure to link the discipline with organisational strategy, is overcome. The pathway to achieve this lies in the development of a reliable and effective performance measurement system that, for the most part, will be unique to each organisation. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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.

The process of building Data Warehouses (DW) is well known with well defined stages but at the same time, mostly carried out manually by IT people in conjunction with business people. Web Warehouses (WW) are DW whose data sources are taken from the web. We define a flexible WW, which can be configured accordingly to different domains, through the selection of the web sources and the definition of data processing characteristics. A Business Process Management (BPM) System allows modeling and executing Business Processes (BPs) providing support for the automation of processes. To support the process of building flexible WW we propose a two BPs level: a configuration process to support the selection of web sources and the definition of schemas and mappings, and a feeding process which takes the defined configuration and loads the data into the WW. In this paper we present a proof of concept of both processes, with focus on the configuration process and the defined data.

Teamwork, collaboration and coordination are key aspects of the patient-centric approach taken by modern healthcare. Although many projects have been and are currently being undertaken to improve support for health care professionals, adequate support for teamwork, communication and coordination has yet to be achieved. The delivery of the healthcare service is very challenging as it involves heterogeneous distributed systems, multi-professionals and dependent tasks among each. In addition, the treatment journey of each patient is unique as a decision is usually made according to several constraints related to the patient, medical condition, patient’s choice, available resources and/or doctor’s consultation decision. We believe that, in order to provide the required support, it is necessary to explicitly acknowledge the patient’ s medical state within their treatment journey. This project proposes the use of a Business Process Management (BPM) system that uses associations between patients, health care professionals, and the Integrated Care Pathway (ICP) to provide improved support for healthcare professionals as individuals and members of integrated care teams. Moreover, mapping the ICP into the BPM system will help support the implementation of best practice according to the national guidelines. By leveraging the information contained in these associations, and understanding the patient progress along the dynamic care pathway, this proposal provides tailored context-based actions. This includes automated notifications, alerts, scheduling and timers, as well as supporting treatment continuity and tracking as the patient progresses through their treatment journey. Clinicians’ and developers’ feedback on this proposal has been very positive.Keywordsbusiness process management (BPM)case managementcontext-based actionsintegrated care pathway (ICP)workflow technology

A highly efficient algorithm towards optimal data storage and regeneration cost in multiple clouds

Enabling flexible location-aware business process modeling and execution

Business process management (BPM) systems provide a broad range of facilities to enact and manage operational business processes. Ideally, these systems should provide support for the complete BPM life-cycle: (re)design, configuration, execution, control, and diagnosis of processes. However, based on an extensive evaluation of the FileNet P8 BPM Suite, we show that existing BPM tools are unable to support the full life-cycle. There are clearly gaps between the various phases (e.g., users need to transfer or interpret information without any support) and some of the phases (e.g., the redesign and diagnosis phases) are not supported sufficiently. This chapter shows that techniques for process mining and intelligent redesign can be used to offer better support for the (re)design and diagnosis phases and, thus, close the BPM life-cycle. We also briefly report on the work done in the context of the ProM tool, which is used as framework to experiment with such techniques.Request access from your librarian to read this chapter's full text.

Knowledge management (KM) has been considered as a new corporate information system paradigm for knowledge-intensive enterprises of the information age. Its acceptance by the corporate world, however, is below expectation. Recently, several attempts have been made to combine KM with business process management (BPM) that is a new approach to effectively managing business processes as corporate assets. Clear descriptions about their interrelationship or a comprehensive framework to combine them, however, has not been provided. This paper explores how KM and BPM can complement each other and proposes a framework to integrate the two paradigms. The paper classifies process knowledge into three types and suggests how they can extend the functionalities of existing knowledge management systems and business process management systems by considering the lifecycle requirements of both knowledge and business processes. The framework and extended functionalities can provide a new corporate paradigm that combines the advantages of KM and BPM. Further, important corporate knowledge about business processes can be defined and managed in a single framework.

IoT (Internet of Things) has the capability of capturing dynamic context from the physical world into the digital world. Context-aware BPM (Business Process Management) should integrate IoT as a key perspective of dynamic context of a business process and to enhance the decision making in a business process. IoT is often used to automate the process execution or integrated in the process model as resources of smart devices and additional concepts. In this way, IoT data is directly used without processing or reasoning with other contextual data to obtain higher-order contextual knowledge, which impairs its potential capability. The context layer and the decision layer are still missing while integrating IoT in BPM to obtain context-awareness. Decisions are still considered within context-aware BPM in a traditional way. This paper provides a separate concern of decisions from the process flow. We propose that the context-aware BPM ecosystem consists of four components which are: context-aware process models, context models, decision models and context-aware process execution. A framework is proposed to connect the IoT infrastructure to the context-aware BPM ecosystem using IoT-integrated ontologies and IoT-enhanced decision models, which enables the capabilities of IoT to make business processes and the decision making involved aware of the dynamic context.

In previous chapters, we have discussed the use of the multilevel business artifact (MBA) for multilevel business process modeling in order to better represent the interactions between the different hierarchy levels within a company. As the preparation for a proof-of-concept implementation, in Chapter 6, we have introduced an XML-based logical representation for MBAs. Relying on this XML representation, in this chapter, we present the implementation concept for a business process management system that enables the MBA-based (semi-)automated execution of multilevel business processes. A business process management system manages process-related data and allows for the event-driven execution of business processes; a business process management system also records event data. The recording of event data in event logs is a pre-requisite for business process intelligence which allows for performance analysis and the subsequent improvement of business processes based on the analysis results.