Short introduction to business process modelling Prof. Dr.(PL) Michael Unterstein Short introduction to business process modelling Business process vs. traditional functional business organisation What is a business process? Elements of business process models Modelling business processes with event- driven process chains (EPC) Analysing a business process

1. Business process vs. traditional functional business organisation check order, accept / reject how much does it cost? how much does it cost? deliver confirm order bill acquire necessary parts can we produce it? customer wants to order something are parts avalilable? when? produce Organisational units (departments) are formed by concentrating specific tasks, e.g. production of goods, purchasing goods, sales.

Problems with functional organisation Different tasks of a process (e.g. order fulfilment) are executed by different organisational units Decision competencies decentralised Workflow interrupted every time an OU changes Coordination problems Long completion time for processes Orders often not completed in time

Process-oriented organisation oriented to overall workflow of an order, project, etc. single responsibility for the whole process the structures of functional organisation are used and conserved, not destroyed attempt to eliminate time-consuming coordination problems Precondition processes in an enterprise must be known processes in an enterprise must be analysed processes in an enterprise must be documented

Business process - definition "A business process consists of a set of activities performed in coordination in an organisational and technical environment. These activities lead jointly to a business goal." "Each business process is enacted by a single organisation, but it may interact with business processes performed by other organisations." [Wens07]

Business process management "(..) includes concepts, methods and techniques to support the design, administration, configuration, enactment and analysis of business processes." [Wens07] [Wikipedia]

Business process modelling Diverse modelling methods and techniques Petri nets UML activity diagrams event-driven process chains (EPC) business process modelling notation (BPMN) Methods and tools for evaluating models animation, simulation calculation (time, cost, resource usage, …)

Elements of processes Sales Process order fulfilment Production Beginning: Customer wants a machine Logistics End: Machine delivered to the customer SAP R/3 CAD software What ist missing?

Exercise Please describe the process as text, which is executed in a shop for mobile communication if a customer (e.g. you) wants to get a new contract and a smartphone. Use the elements described before: Start and end of the process Single activities to be executed Used material and tools Involved organization units (or employees)

Event-driven process chains developed by Prof. Wilhelm-August Scheer at the Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik at the Universität des Saarlandes in the early 1990s first used: documentation of processes within SAP R/3 used by many companies for modelling, analysing and redesigning business processes semiformal, easy to understand by non-experts and evaluable with the help of mathematical methods (like Petri nets)

Simple example Event Function Flow Connector

Elements of EPCs

Logic of Flow represented by Logical Connectors

Different Types of "OR"

Different Splits and Joins in Control Flow Events cannot decide!

Example: Mortgage application Parallel execution Loop “acquire more docs“ = “acquire more documents“

Some rules for EPCs at least one function at least one start event at least one end event each function is preceded and followed by an event an event is preceded and followed by a function, except the start and end events each event and function has, at most, one ingoing and one outgoing flow splits and joins are realised via connectors an OR or XOR split cannot be invoked by an event (events cannot decide anything)

Exercise When an enquiry has arrived, the following 2 tasks are executed in parallel: checking production capacity and checking available stock. If production capacity is not sufficient, then send negative reply to customer. If production capacity is sufficient and the stock is sufficient, send positive reply to customer. If stock is not sufficient, send negative reply to customer. Design an EPC.

Global Citizens Want to Be Mobile Develop an EPC for the process of bike rental as described in: http://www.mikesbiketoursamsterdam.com/rent-a-bike-amsterdam/ Before you start, reflect which parts of the description may be modeled as process and which represent just additional informations

Attributes Function Event execution time (min, max, avg) waiting time and other times execution costs … Event number of activations probability

What is the average completion time? 100 Instances/day 5 min 3 min 80% 20% 4 min 2 min 90% 10% 3 min

Expected completion time say: max 3 loops, 3+4=7 min per loop cycle 1st term: documents are complete, but no securities (20%) 2nd term: securities available (80%), documents instantly complete (90% of rest) 3rd term: more documents to be acquired (10%) Result can be achieved via simulation as well!

Tools for modelling and simulation ARIS Express http://download.ariscommunity.com ORYX http://oryx-project.org http://academic.signavio.com BFlow http://sourceforge.net/projects/bflowtoolbox ARIS Toolset MS Visio Bizagi Process Modeler

Exercise: Analyze Customer Enquiry with Respect of Execution Time When an enquiry has arrived, the following 2 tasks are executed in parallel: checking production capacity (3 time units) and checking available stock (4 tu). If production capacity is not sufficient, then send negative reply to customer (1 tu). If production capacity is sufficient and the stock is sufficient, send positive reply to customer (2 tu). If stock is not sufficient, send negative reply to customer(1 tu). Design an EPC. After how many time units (minimum) can a positive reply be prepared? How many tu does the process require when the customer is to get a positive reply?

Exercise: Travel agency Customer C enters TA. Employee E enters C‘s data (3 tu). E searches for appropriate travel offers (5 tu) and presents them to C (10 tu). Now C has to decide between 3 alternatives (4 tu): (a) no journey at all (b) wants more offers (c) accepts the offered journey If (a), C‘s data are deleted (1 tu), and process ends If (b), E searches for more offers, and again C decides If (c), contract is prepared (2 tu), and process ends Design an EPC. How many tu does the process last if C decides (a) after first offer? How many tu does the process last if C decides (c) after second offer?

From Business Processes to IT Solutions [MaBu10]

Literature and Internet sources Wesk07 Business Process Management. Springer 2007 AAHW03 Wil M. P. van der Aalst, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede and Mathias Weske Business process management: concepts, languages, architectures. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2003, Volume 2678/2003, 1019, DOI: 10.1007/3-540-44895-0_1 Business Process Management: A Survey. MaBu10 Dirk Maurer, Patrick Buech ARIS Solution for Enterprise Architecture Management Vom Geschäftsprozess zur Enterprise Architecture, Software AG 2010