Semantically enabled business process discovery

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

Business Process and Practice Alignment Meta-model

Business process descriptions are useful documents that are becoming increasingly important for identifying and documenting business processes. They are particularly beneficial during discovery when information about the process is gathered in interviews or by observation. Such business process descriptions are written as natural language text, which makes them intrinsically ambiguous. For this reason, it is the major challenge to formulate them in a precise and correct way right from the start. Therefore, this paper presents a service oriented architecture that analyzes a process description written in natural language to generate a sound process description. Being sound means that a description is structured, unambiguous, reveals possible quality and soundness problems related to BPMN 2.0, and contains clear identifiers for all known process elements in the original text. More specifically, we develop specific analysis and transformation techniques that are integrated by our proposed architecture. For validation purposes, we have implemented a prototype of this architecture. Our evaluation demonstrates that our techniques to generate sound process descriptions cover an average of 95% of the information extracted from its original process description while maintaining quality properties. Finally, our architecture can be enhanced with additional services that contribute to the creation and management of processes descriptions in organizations.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An emerging technology like business process execution language (BPEL) and its implementation in BPEL for Web services (BPEL4WS) gives extra possibilities in describing business processes. It further adheres, as a technology, in a consistent way to the underlying Web service-based implementation technology and is a perfect fit for service-oriented architectures (SOA) as they are currently implemented throughout organizations as a successor to enterprise application integration (EAI). However, BPEL4WS, in its current implementation, will only serve in a static way for production workflows. In this chapter we discuss how Semantic Web services through a semantic service-oriented architecture (SSOA) can be used to extend BPEL4WS to create ad hoc and collaborative workflows.

The article is devoted to development of provisions for securing business flexibility in conditions of war in Ukraine. It is recommended that even during the war Ukrainian companies should strive to follow the scientific approaches to management, including the process approach as one of the most widely used. The article stresses the advantages of process approach to management and Business Process Management as its practical implementation, such as standardization of business processes (allowing companies to continuously follow the optimal way to perform the business process, to automate it and to decrease the variability of its outputs); integration of different functional areas in company’s activity; improved productivity; continuous business process improvement; visibility, transparency and measurability of the company’s activity, allowing to determine and eliminate the root causes of business process failures; clear definition and distribution of duties, roles and responsibilities in the company; improved knowledge management and auditing procedures. Despite the point of view that Business Process Management decreases the business flexibility due to standardization of processes, the article states that being properly designed, business processes must have multiple alternative scenarios, allowing to quickly changing the way the business process is performed and thus improving its flexibility. But even if a company was not prepared for the scenario of war, it can follow the recommendations provided in this article in order to secure the flexibility of its entire business and separate business processes. Such recommendations include actualization the key reference points in the company’s activity (goals, customers, suppliers, products, etc.); identification of the most problematic business processes affected by the war; development or change of the business process descriptions, which must be more or less detailed depending on the level of process, its technological variability and the level of uncertainty in environment; reviewing the requirements to business processes outputs and inputs; and reviewing the business rules related to changes in business processes.

The basic concepts of the strategic management paradigm are studied. Its adaptation for formation of the mechanism of strategic development of administrative potential of the enterprise and its effective realization is executed. Emphasis is placed on the fact that the modern paradigm of strategic development of managerial capacity is based on a person-centered approach. The basis of the approach is the potential of management staff in the target strategic areas of enterprise development. For a modern enterprise, the strategic goals of the development of its management system and capacity should be such as digitalization of the enterprise, the development of its corporate culture; introduction of modern management methodologies, etc. Discussions on comparing the advantages and disadvantages of strategic, situational and process management became the basis for the formation of a paradigmatic structure. It provides for the definition of the overall strategy, strategic activities, scenarios for their implementation in accordance with management situations, taking into account the management signals of external and internal environments. Management scenarios are formed on the basis of a set of management processes. Description and analysis of business processes allows to determine the roles of each participant in the process and the results of its implementation. The general management procedures developed according to the defined scenarios should correspond to the defined purposes and values both of the enterprise, and its personnel. Involvement and motivation of staff to identify personal and professional potential is the basis of the paradigm model of development of managerial potential of the enterprise. The proposed paradigm of strategic management of the development of managerial potential of the enterprise is based on known approaches to the formation of a synergetic system of strategic, situational, operational and process management to achieve the goals of enterprise development. Emphasis on the development of management staff potential, effective management decision-making procedures and implementation of management processes allows to form such a formula for effective development of SCP - active dynamic development of management staff potential, based on the values of the enterprise and its corporate culture in the introduction of innovative management methodologies. implementation of management decisions with the help of modern information technologies. The paradigm of strategic development of SCP is based on the delimitation (decomposition) of goals and functions of different types of management with their subsequent integration into a single system (composition) of management of SCP development at all levels from general enterprise to self-management and individual development.