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BUSINESS PROCESS
MANAGEMENT
Readings:
• M. Dumas, M. La Rosa, J. Mendling, and H. Reijers. Fundamentals of Business
Process Management. Springer, 2018.

Overview of BPM
• Managing business processes is a huge challenge in most organizations. Many
business owners assume that it is a huge expense or that it is only worth it for
massive processes.
• However, BPM is important no matter what size the business is. BPM helps to
manage business processes using automation.
• Business process management (BPM) is how a company creates, edits, and
analyzes the predictable processes that make up the core of its business.
• Each department in a company is responsible for taking some raw material or
data and transforming it into something else. There may be a dozen or more core
processes that each department handles.
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What is Business Process Management?

• Business process management is neither task management (which focuses on individual

tasks) nor project management (which handles one-time or unpredictable flows).
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What is Business Process Management?

• Task management is about handling or organizing a set of activities that
arise out of a project. These projects are often one-time and non-
repeatable.
• When these projects are well-organized like in construction work, a project
management software like ‘Microsoft Project’ is used. Trello, Asana, or
Kissflow Project are good tools for managing tasks in ad-hoc projects.
• Business process management is focused more on repetitive and ongoing
processes that follow a predictable pattern, or process management.

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Why does BPM matter?

• When left unorganized and unsystematized, poor business processes can lead to
chaos. At the individual level, people only see one part of a process, and very few
can scan out and see the full effects of a process, where it starts and ends, the
key data needed, and where potential bottlenecks and inefficiencies lie.
• Unmanaged, chaotic processes hurt business and lead to one or more of these
scenarios:
• Time wasted
• More errors
• Increased blame
• Lack of data
• Demoralized employees

Steps of a BPM lifecycle

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Steps of a BPM lifecycle

Step 1: Design
• Most processes include a form to collect data and a workflow to process it.
Build your form and identify who will own each task in the workflow.
Step 2: Model
• Represent the process in a visual layout. Fix details like deadlines and
conditions to give a clear idea of the sequence of events, and the flow of data
through the process.
Step 3: Execute
• Execute the process by testing it live with a small group first and then open it
up to all users. Make sure you restrict access to sensitive information.

Steps of a BPM lifecycle

Step 4: Monitor
• Keep an eye on the process as it runs through the workflow. Use the right
metrics to identify progress, measure efficiency, and locate bottlenecks.
Step 5: Optimize
• As you analyze, notice any changes that need to be done to your form or
workflow to make them more efficient. Consider business process
improvement steps.

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Business Process Modeling

• Business Process Modeling (or) process modeling, is the analytical
representation or put simply an illustration of an organization’s business
processes. Modeling processes is a critical component for effective business
process management.
• Process modeling software gives an analytical representation of ‘as-is’ processes
in an organization and contrasts it with ‘to-be’ processes for making them more
efficient.
• There are many benefits to Business Process Modeling:
• Gives everyone a clear understanding of how the process works.
• Provides consistency and controls the process.
• Identifies and eliminates redundancies and inefficiencies.
• Sets a clear starting and ending to the process.

B. P. Modeling techniques
• Business Process Modeling can be expressed through flowcharts, programs, hypertext,
or scripts. There isn’t just one way to implement business process modeling; in fact, you
can choose from as many as 12 techniques. Most common ones:
• Business Process Modeling and Notation (BPMN)
• UML diagrams
• Universal Process Notation (UPN)
• Flowchart technique
• Gantt charts
• Colored Petri-nets
• Object oriented methods
• Simulation models, to be given in Integrated Control of Production Systems course.

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Business Process Modeling and Notation

• Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) has become the de-facto standard
for business processes diagrams.
• It is intended to be used directly by the stakeholders who design, manage and
realize business processes, but at the same time be precise enough to allow
BPMN diagrams to be translated into software process components.
• BPMN has an easy-to-use flowchart-like notation that is independent of any
particular implementation environment.
• See BPMNv2.0 in https://www.bpmn.org/.

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Business Process Modeling and Notation

• With over 100 symbols, BPMN is a fairly complex language. But as a learner, there
is no reason to panic!
• A handful of those symbols will already allow you to cover many of your modeling
needs. Once you have mastered this subset of BPMN, the remaining symbols will
naturally come to you with practice.
• So instead of describing every BPMN symbol at length, we will learn BPMN by
introducing its symbols and concepts by means of examples.

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Core set of symbols in BPMN

• A business process involves events and activities.
• Events represent things that happen instantaneously (e.g. an invoice has been
received);
• Activities represent units of work that have a duration (e.g. an activity to pay
an invoice).
• The most elementary form of relation is that of sequence, which implies that one
event or activity A is followed by another event or activity B.
• The three most basic concepts of BPMN are event, activity, and arc. Events are
represented by circles, activities by rounded rectangles, and arcs (called sequence
flows in BPMN) are represented by arrows with a full arrow-head.
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Simple order fulfillment process

• Symbols in the example:

• Start event indicates when instances of the process start;
• Six activities;
• End event indicates when instances complete.

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Progress of three instances

• A token identify the progress (or state) of an instance.
• Figure below shows the state of three instances of the order fulfillment
process.

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Branching and merging

• Example with two gateways: an exclusive (XOR) split gateway and an XOR-join
gateway.
• An XOR gateway is indicated with an empty diamond or with a diamond marked with
an “X”:

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Parallel execution
• The parallel (AND) gateway is used to execute activities in parallel. It contains an
AND-split and an AND-join.

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Order fulfillment extended

• Assume that a purchase order is only confirmed if the product is in stock, otherwise
the process completes by rejecting the order.

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Variant with two different triggers

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Inclusive decisions
• One may need to take one or more branches after a decision activity.
• Example:
• A company has two warehouses that store different products: Amsterdam and
Hamburg. When an order is received, it is distributed across these warehouses: if
some of the relevant products are maintained in Amsterdam, a sub-order is sent
there; likewise, if some relevant products are maintained in Hamburg, a sub-order is
sent there. Afterwards, the order is registered and the process completes.

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First trial

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Second trial

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Model with the OR gateway

• One needs an inclusive (OR) split gateway, i.e. more than one of them can be
true at the same time, to obtain a simpler model.

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Rework and Repetition

• A process model for addressing ministerial correspondence.
• Process is repeated until response is approved.

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Information artifacts
• Artifacts like “Purchase order” are called data objects in BPMN.
• Data objects represent information flowing in and out of activities; they can be
physical artifacts such as an invoice or a letter on a piece of paper, or electronic
artifacts such as an e-mail or a file.
• Data objects are linked to activities with a dotted arrow with an open arrowhead
(called data association in BPMN).
• A data store is a place containing data objects that need to be persisted beyond
the duration of a process instance, e.g. a database for electronic artifacts or a
filing cabinet for physical ones. Process activities can read/write data objects
from/to data stores.

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Order fulfillment
with artifacts

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Resources

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Collaboration
diagram

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Example

https://doi.org/10.1080/00207543.2019.1683250
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BPMN workflow

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QCL simulation model 3D renders from SIMIO

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Conclusions
• The simulation study presented in this paper contributed to estimate tangible key
performance metrics of the quality control laboratory under design that would
otherwise be unavailable.
• Alternative governance models were benchmarked based on multi-criteria
objectives, such as minimizing the sample time in the system while ensuring that
the analysts’ scheduled utilization level remained within specific intervals.
• The factor with the highest impact was found to be the organizational policy;
crucially, for the same allocated resources, free-for-all models resulted in faster
processing times. The time-savings when compared to a structured policy
amount to 40% in the case of IPC samples, and 80% for stability samples.

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