Multilevel Business Process Automation

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

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) provide automated support for the execution of business processes in modern organisations. With the advent of cloud computing, the deployment of BPMS is shifting from traditional on-premise models to the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) paradigm with the aim of delivering Business Process Automation as a Service on the cloud. To cope with the impact of numerous simultaneous requests from multiple tenants, a typical SaaS approach will launch multiple instances of its core applications and distribute workload to these application instances via load balancing strategies that operate under the assumption that tenant requests are stateless. However, since business process executions are stateful and often long-running, strategies that assume statelessness are inadequate for ensuring a uniform distribution of system load. In this paper, we propose several new load balancing strategies that support the deployment of BPMS in the cloud by taking into account (a) the workload imposed by the execution of stateful process instances from multiple tenants and (b) the capacity and availability of BPMS workflow engines at runtime. We have developed a prototypical implementation built upon an open-source BPMS and used it to evaluate the performance of the proposed load balancing strategies within the context of diverse load scenarios with models of varying complexity.

There are numerous organizations that limit themselves to the modeling of business processes and do not automate and execute business processes using a Business Process Management System (BPMS). Consequently, these organizations cannot exploit the potential of process execution logs for the performance analysis of their business processes. In this study, we contend that customer feedback in natural language is a rich source of information that can provide valuable indications about process performance. However, as the number of comments increases, the time and effort required to synthesize them and elicit indications about process performance increases exponentially. To that end, in this paper we propose an approach that takes customer feedback as input and provides valuable indications about process performance. Specifically, the proposed approach is composed of three types of classification that leverage from a supervised learning technique to automatically classify customer feedback. The classified comments are subsequently used to generate answers to performance related questions. Evaluation of the proposed approach is conducted by using a real-life case study of an academic institute. For the case study we collected 4366 student comments about the admission process of the institute and manually classified the comments for each type of classification. Subsequently, these classified comments are used as a benchmark for the evaluation of our proposed approach. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.

Organizations sharing common goals are required to integrate their software systems in order set up collaborative business processes (BPs). An integration platform with a Business Process Management System (BPMS) can offer the needed technological support to realize these processes. Also, including widely used social platforms (e.g. Facebook, Twitter) provides support for realizing human tasks within the BPMS. In this paper, we propose a process-aware inter-organizational service integration platform to allow the interaction between collaborating organizations. The platform extends a defined integration platform by adding support for the execution of collaborative BPs and can be used within different domains.

In order to increase IT and business agility or to improve IT systems and business processes integration many organizations are currently implementing business process management systems (BPMS) or adopting a service-oriented architecture (SOA) paradigm. However, in doing so, IT complexity will admittedly increase and IT managers then are in need of effective governance techniques covering both strategic initiatives, BPM and SOA. This contribution re-examines the problem domain in the novel Enhanced Process-Driven Architecture (ePDA) model in order to systematically derive the requirements for combined BPM and SOA governance. We then formulate a semantic meta model capable of capturing necessary artifacts and describe its technical implementation in Software AG’s and Fujitsu’s joint CentraSite governance re gis try/repository. As "lessons learned" from several projects we systematically derive governance benefits using the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and highlight measures on software deployment issues.KeywordsSOA GovernanceBPM GovernanceBusiness Process Manage-mentIT GovernanceAnalytic Hierarchy Process (AHP)

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.

This article maintains that a strong sense of ethics and ethical awareness is essential to help promote and cultivate adequate and appropriate (human sensitive) approaches during the development, implementation and execution of business processes. Businesses and their corresponding processes, and science in general have leaned on tenets of deterministic philosophies which gave rise to mechanistic thinking. As such technologically-based proposals and/or enactments—like modern business processes to a point—do not have within themselves the means to be ethically self-aware. It is in a technologically driven culture where mechanistic/deterministic approaches may trivialise the dignity of humans, ethics are able to mediate technology by helping to reflect on its purpose and usefulness. The authors propose a model that is a more holistic approach—including an ethical review phase—during the design, implementation, and execution of computer-based business processes so as to avoid an overtly mechanistic approach that devalues humans.

Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) need to be able to take into account the fluctuating demand for computational resources during the execution of business process activities. Today, BPMS rely on the leasing and releasing of virtual machines (VMs) on cloud resources, which leads to a rather coarse-grained allocation of computational resources. This may result in an increase in the execution cost, flexibility restrictions, and a negative impact on the Quality of Service. In order to overcome these drawbacks, we introduce the Vienna Platform for Elastic Processes on Containers (ViePEP-C). ViePEP-C is an elastic BPMS that uses containers instead of VMs for the execution of business process activities on cloud resources, leading to a more fine-grained execution environment. To achieve this, ViePEP-C offers cloud controller, monitoring and business process execution functionalities and provides a platform for different resource and task scheduling algorithms. To evaluate the benefits of ViePEP-C, we further present a resource and task scheduling algorithm and show that, by using containers as execution environment, the execution cost can be decreased by over 20 percent (compared to a state-of-the-art VM-based scheduling algorithm) while considering a high service level.

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.

Keeping our rivers clean: Information-theoretic online anomaly detection for streaming business process events

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.

This article reports on the Design Science engineering cycle for implementing a modeling method to support model-driven, process-centric API management. The BPMN standard was hereby enriched on semantic, syntactic and tool levels in order to provide a viable solution for integrating API requests with diagrammatic business process models in order to facilitate the documentation or testing of REST API calls directly in a modeling environment. The method can be implemented by stakeholders that need to map and manage their API ecosystem, thus gaining more API management agility and improving their software engineering productivity. By assimilating API ecosystem conceptualization in the modeling environment, the proposal differs from both RPA (which typically employs non-BPMN process diagramming e.g., in UIPath) and BPM Systems (which typically isolate all API-related semantics outside the process modeling language to keep the diagrammatic representation standard-compliant).

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess the state of the art of social business process management (Social BPM), explaining applied approaches, existing tools and challenges and to propose a research agenda for encouraging further development of the area.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology comprises a qualitative analysis using secondary data. The approach relies on searches of scientific papers conducted in well-known databases, identifying research work related to Social BPM solutions and those contributing with social characteristics to BPM. Based on the identified papers, the authors selected the most relevant and the latest publications, and categorized their contributions and findings based on open and selective coding. In total, the analysis is based on 51 papers that were selected and analyzed in depth.FindingsMain results show that there are several studies investigating modeling approaches for socializing process activities and for capturing implicit knowledge possessed and used by process actors, enabling to add some kind of flexibility to business processes. However, despite the proven interest in the area, there are not yet adequate tools providing effective solutions for Social BPM. Based on our findings, the authors propose a research agenda comprising three main lines: contributions of social software (SS) to Social BPM, Social BPM as a mechanism for adding flexibility to and for discovering new business processes and Social BPM for enhancing business processes with the use of new technologies. The authors also identify relevant problems for each line.Practical implicationsSome SS tools, like wikis, enable managing social aspects in executing business processes and can be used to coordinate simple business processes. Despite they are commonly used, they are not yet mature tools supporting Social BPM and more efficient tools are yet to appear. The lack of tools preclude organizations from benefitting from implicit knowledge owned by and shared among business process actors, which could contribute to better-informed decisions related to organizational processes. In addition, more research is needed for considering Social BPM as an approach for organizations to benefit from the adoption of new technologies in their business processes.Originality/valueThe paper assesses the state of the art in Social BPM, an incipient area in research and practice. The area can be defined as the intersection of two bigger areas highly relevant for organizations; on the one hand, the management and execution of business processes; and on the other hand, the use of social software, including social media tools, for leveraging on implicit knowledge shared by business process actors to improving efficiency of business processes.

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.

The aim of organizations is to achieve their business goals with reduced costs. Therefore, it is very important to accurately compute the cost of their business processes and to extend the business process models with cost perspective in order to support decision-makers in reducing these costs. Different approaches proposed an extension of business process models with cost perspective using event logs. However, these approaches do not consider the achievement of the business goals, while it is crucial to provide information about costs incurred by the business process execution that led (or not) to the achievement of the business goals. Such costs, named business costs, depend on the reliability of the business process. Thus, we consider to propose a business cost mining approach allowing the extension of business process models with business cost perspective using cost-annotated event logs. This approach includes business cost description and analysis in order to extract knowledge about factors influencing on business costs. This will further support decision-makers to reduce the costs of their business processes. In this paper, we propose an approach towards business cost mining allowing the extension of business process models with business cost perspective at the activity level.KeywordsBusiness process improvementBusiness cost miningReliabilityBusiness process model cost extension