Lecture 9: Business Process Modeling Notation Dr. Taysir Hassan December 17, 2015 INF411 Information Engineering Information Systems Dept. Faculty of Computers & Information

Agenda Business Process Management Business Process Modeling Notation

What is a (Business) Process? Collection of related events, activities and decisions, that involve a number of actors and resources, and that collectively lead to an outcome that is of value to an organization or its customers. Examples: Order-to-Cash Procure-to-Pay Application-to-Approval Claim-to-Settlement Fault-to-Resolution (Issue-to-Resolution)

fault-report-to-resolution process “My washing machine won’t work!” VALUE Customer Warranty? Parts Store Service Dispatch Technician CustomerCall CentreCustomer © Michael Rosemann

Processes and Outcomes Every process leads to one or several outcomes, positive or negative – Positive outcomes deliver value – Negative outcomes reduce value Fault-to-resolution process – Fault repaired without technician intervention – Fault repaired with minor technician intervention – Fault repaired and fully covered by warranty – Fault repaired and partly covered by warranty – Fault repaired but not covered by warranty – Fault not repaired (customer withdrew request)

What is a Business Process: Recap

BPM: What is it? Body of principles, methods and tools to design, analyze, execute and monitor business processes

Why BPM? “The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.”

Why BPM? Information Technology Process Change Yields Business Value Index Group (1982) Enables

How to engage in BPM? Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) Does not put into question the current process structure Seeks to identify issues and resolve them incrementally, one step at a time and one fix at a time Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) Puts into question the fundamental assumptions and principles of the existing process structure Aims to achieve breakthrough, for example by removing costly tasks that do not directly add value

How the process worked? (“as is”)

Reengineering Process (“to be”)

The result… 75% reduction in head count Material control is simpler and financial information is more accurate Purchase requisition is faster Less overdue payments  Why automate something we don’t need to do? Automate things that need to be done.

How to engage in BPM? 1.Process identification and opportunity assessment 2.Process discovery (as-is) 3. Process analysis 4. Process re-design (to-be) 5. Process implementation 6. Process monitoring/controlling Process Modeling Tools Process Management Systems

Process Identification Core processes Support processes Management processes Quote handling Product delivery Invoice handling Detailed quote handling process

Purposes of Process Modeling Communication, simulation, activity- based costing… Detailed Models including Data types, conditions, data mappings, fault handling… Integration, testing, deployment…

Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) OMG Standard, supported by many tools: – Signavio ( – TIBCO Business Studio (free download, quite large) – IBM Websphere Business Modeler – ARIS – Oracle BPA – Business Process Visual Architect (Visual Paradigm) – Progress Savvion Business Modeller

BPMN Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) is one of the standards being developed by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI).

Goals of BPMI (1)The specification of open standards for process design (2)The support of suppliers and users of business process management techniques and tools.

What is BPMN? A Graphical modeling language, with symbols, relationships and attributes for the purpose of process modeling Expression of processes generated into executable processes (BPEL) Simple, ‘flowchart-like’ non-IT practitioner consumption

Uses of Business process modeling Business Process modeling is used to communicate a wide variety of information to a wide variety of audiences. BPMN is designed to cover many types of modeling and allows the creation of end-to- end Business Processes. Structural elements of BPMN allow the viewer to be able to easily differentiate between sections of a BPMN Diagram.

BPMN 2.0 Formalizes the execution semantics for all BPMN elements Defines an extensibility mechanism for both Process model extensions and graphical extensions Refines Event composition and correlation Extends the definition of human interactions Defines a Choreography model

BPMN & Process Models Process Modeling - capture of ordered sequences of business activities & info

BPMN & Process Models (Cont…) Business Processes – description of how a business pursues its objectives: – Process Maps: simple flow charts of high-level activities – Process Descriptions: flow charts with more information (not enough for full realisation) – Process Model: flow charts with enough information for analysis, simulation, execution BPMN supports each of these levels

Event-based Gateway

Pizza example If we step through the diagram, we should start with the pizza customer, who has noticed her stomach growling. The customer therefore selects a pizza and orders it. After that, the customer waits for the pizza to be delivered.

The event based gateway after the task “order a pizza” indicates that the customer actually waits for two different events that could happen next: Either the pizza is delivered, as indicated with the following message event, or there is no delivery for 60 minutes, i.e., after one hour the customer skips waiting and calls the vendor, asking for the pizza.

We now assume that the clerk promises the pizza to be delivered soon, and the customers waits for the pizza again, asking again after the next 60 minutes, and so on. Let’s have a closer look at the vendor process now. It is triggered by the order of the customer, as shown with the message start event and the message flow going from “order a pizza” to that event.

After baking the pizza, the delivery boy will deliver the pizza and receive the payment, which includes giving a receipt to the customer.

In this example, we use message objects not only for informational objects, as the pizza order, but also for physical objects, like the pizza or the money. We can do this, because those physical objects actually act as informational objects inherently:

When the pizza arrives at the customer’s door, she will recognize this arrival and therefore know that the pizza has arrived, which is exactly the purpose of the accordant message event in the customer’s pool. Of course, we can only use the model in that way because this example is not meant to be executed by a process engine.

References Dumas, La Rosa, Mendling & Reijers: Fundamentals of Business Process Management, Springer 2013

Final Exam 70 points: answer 5 questions out of 6 The questions are : 1 MCQ, 5 of the following UML, BPMN diagrams, and the rest of the lectures.