Utilizing Customer Feedback for Business Process Performance Analysis

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has become the de facto standard for process modeling. Currently, BPMN models can be (a) analyzed or simulated using specialized tools, (b) executed using business process management systems (BPMSs), or (c) used for requirements elicitation. Although there are many studies comparing BPMN to other modeling techniques for analyzing and executing processes, there are few showing the suitability of BPMN models as a source for requirements comprehension in projects where process-aware software is built without using BPMSs. This chapter presents a study aimed at comparing the comprehension of software requirements regarding a business process using either BPMN or traditional techniques, such as use cases. In our study, we analyzed responses of 120 undergraduate and graduate students regarding the requirements comprehension achieved when using only BPMN models, only use cases, or both. The results do not show significant impact of the artifacts on the comprehension level. However, when the understanding of the requirement involves sequence of activities, using the BPMN shows better results on the comprehension time.

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.

Business Process Management (BPM) brings together the idea of effectively managing organizations and properly using Information Technology to fulfill organizations’ needs. For this purpose, BPM systems are largely used nowadays. However, most process models are started from scratch, not having reuse promoted. Sometimes, large enterprises have the same business process implemented in a variety of ways due to differences in their departmental cultures or environments, even when using a unique integrated system. Additionally, although technology plays an important role in actually improving organizations, the human factor is still fundamental, since any improvement attempt goes through cultural changes. In this chapter, a peer-to-peer (P2P) tool is proposed as a way to cooperatively develop business processes models, minimizing the time needed to develop such models, reducing the differences among similar processes conducted in distinct organizational units, enhancing the quality of models, promoting reuse, and distributing knowledge.

Business process modelling is an important part of system design. When designing or redesigning a business process, stakeholders specify, negotiate, and agree on business requirements to be satisfied, including non-functional requirements that concern the quality of the business process. This thesis addresses the question of how to specify and compute the quality of a business process, given the model that stakeholders use. The motivation for this thesis is the increasing importance of the quality of business processes. Knowing the quality of specific business processes enables stakeholders to judge if these processes need improvement. Knowing the quality of the constructs of those processes (viz., events, inputs, activities, and outputs) and the way they are structured enables a more detailed analysis of their shortcomings and provides a basis for the design of improvements. The research challenge of this thesis is grounded in the assumption that: “Organisations need an appropriate means to effectively compute achievement of their goals and objectives by their business processes.” Given this challenge, the main research question on which this thesis focuses is: “Can the quality of a business process be computed quantitatively at different levels of granularity?” The research objective is: “To develop frameworks, factors, and metrics for computing non-functional requirements (quality) of business processes quantitatively at different levels of granularity.” The outcomes of this thesis are: 1) BPIMM, a language-independent business process integrating meta-model, based on the concepts of seven mainstream business process modelling languages: BPMN, EPC, RAD, UML AD, SADT, IDEF0, and IDEF3. 2) BPC-QC (Business Process Concept - Quality Computation), an approach to quality computation at the lowest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BPC-QEF (Business Process Concept - Quality Evaluation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of the constructs of a business process: event, input, activity, and output. ii. A set of business process quality dimensions and factors. The following quality dimensions are distinguished: performance, efficiency, reliability, recoverability, permissibility, and availability. Each dimension categorises different quality aspects in terms of factors. A non-exhaustive set of sixteen quantitative factors is provided. iii. Quality metrics for each of the quality factors, to facilitate a quantitative computation of the quality of a specific construct of a business process. 3) BP-QC (Business Process - Quality Computation), an approach to compute the quality at the highest level of granularity of a business process. The approach consists of: i. BP-CQCF (Business Process - Compositional Quality Computation Framework), a language-independent generic framework and algorithm to compute the quality of a business process as a whole, given the quality of its constructs. ii. A set of generic business process modelling patterns to decompose a business process into more succinct parts, namely: sequential, parallel with synchronisation, exclusive, inclusive, simple loop, and complex loop. iii. A set of over one hundred computational formulae. For each combination of modelling pattern and a quality factor, there is a formula to compute the quality. 4) AAV (Approach to Application and Validation), an evaluation plan to evaluate BPIMM, BPC-QC and BP-QC in practice, together with expert stakeholders. The plan consists of the units of measure, a measurement model, and a case study procedure. To evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis to real world business needs, four case studies have been conducted in different environments: a Dutch educational institution, a global financial institution, an international financial service provider, and a Dutch research project on crisis management. Each of these case studies concerns a different, single business process. This thesis shows that: 1) A quality computation approach can be adopted independent of a business process modelling language. 2) Quantitative quality factors can be introduced specifically for the constructs of a business process. 3) Quantitative metrics and computational formulae can be developed for specific quality factors, allowing the computation of different aspects of the quality of a business process quantitatively at different levels of granularity. 4) An evaluation plan can be developed to evaluate the applicability of the contributions of this thesis (viz., BPIMM, BPC-QC, and BP-QC). The contributions of this thesis are designed to be beneficial to the areas of business and management, requirements engineering, software engineering, and business process modelling. In the areas of requirements engineering and software engineering, these contributions are intended to help practitioners to consider non-functional requirements at the earliest stage. In the area of business process modelling, information systems, service computing, and cloud computing, the contributions can be used for quality-driven modelling, design, and redesign. To conclude, knowing the quality value of a business process at different levels of granularity provides a basis for its improvement.

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.

Selecting a Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) for an organization is not a trivial task. It requires a thorough evaluation of its capabilities considering the whole support of the business process lifecycle and the organizational environment in which the BPMS will be used. In this context, in a previous work we have proposed a methodology for the systematic evaluation of BPMS, which was mostly focused on required functional and non-technical aspects. In this paper, we present the extension of our methodology with a detailed definition of non-functional aspects to be evaluated, and a set of test cases for their evaluation. We also performed a fine tuning of the methodology based on a comprehensive comparison with other existent methodologies and the provision of tool support. As a case study, we present an evaluation of open source and proprietary BPMS following our proposal.

The main objective of the article is to identify and compare students' awareness of the possibilities of using business process modelling to improve organizational operations. The survey was conducted at the beginning of 2023 in the first and final year of studies at the University of Warsaw, which at the same time allowed to compare the impact of the implementation of the study program on increasing awareness of these possibilities. In addition, the results of the survey were compared with an analysis of the core curriculum. The research was conducted using the CAWI method. The questionnaire prepared for this purpose was first reviewed by experts in the field of business process modeling and then made available on the University of Warsaw servers for students to complete. The research showed that the interest in business process modeling among students entering the University of Warsaw is not very high and that emerging innovations in this field are not known. From the point of view of the University of Warsaw, it is important to note that more than 90% of the students received basic information about Business Process Modeling at the University, so they will be able to use BPM systems in their professional work. The most significant and encouraging information is that almost half of the students graduating from the University of Warsaw use business process modeling systems in their professional work. The conducted study had its limitations - it was conducted in 2023 in only two university faculties (the Faculty of Management and the Faculty of Journalism, Information and Bibliology). It is recommended to increase the number of subjects in the area of business process management in university curricula, which will allow a deeper understanding and a modern approach to the interpretation of economic phenomena. On the basis of the research it was proved that despite the average knowledge of students about computer-based modeling of business processes, they consider it essential for the improvement of business operations.

Enabling flexible location-aware business process modeling and execution