Semantic BPM

From Saltlux

BPM is a field of management focused on aligning organizations with the wants and needs of clients. It is a holistic management approach that promotes business effectiveness and efficiency while striving for innovation, flexibility and integration with technology. As organizations strive for attainment of their objectives, Business process management attempts to continuously improve processes - the process to define, measure and improve your processes – a "process optimization" process (by Wikipedia).

1. Concept
Business process is an assembly of structured activities related to produce services and products to meet the client’s needs. These processes are decisive factors for the profitability to an organization and are often representing the cost at a considerable rate. BPM can generally be discussed in the people and technology points of view.

People
BPM is often regarded as a philosophy. Defining BPM for clients means that client oriented staff should have highest capability to understand and improve the client’s needs. In most cases these improvement items may be accomplished without any new technology.

Technology
BPM System is often looked like all of BPM. Someone thinks that information is something moving between corporate software packages and Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) while others think that BPM is modeling because they believe modeling is the only method for perfect process creation.
There are two concepts to defining the business process. For example, because of the size and complexity of a daily work we need technology that is used efficiently. Bringing power of technology is on of the article of faiths. Many think that BPM is doing role like bridge between IT and business.
BPMS will be an important part of industry softwares like Agilent OpenLab BPM will be developed. Some other products focus on Enterprise Resource Planning and warehouse management. Inspection of BPMS efficiency should be another issue if there is a regulation. [1][2][3][4] The inspection work can be certified by the third party or users, and the efficiency inspection certification must be created. The inspection certification may or may not officially be reported or kept. [5][6][7][8]

BPM has been defined by may people as follows:
i. A kind of change management and system realization technique that continuously recognize and manage the business process that interacts human resources in and out of the organization and system. [Ovum]
ii. A service and tool of definite business process management of process analysis, definition, accomplishment, monitoring and management including level of interaction of human resources and application. [Gartner]
iii. A new class of software to build a new process based application [Delpi Group]
iv. A way of management of an enterprise in process view point. [Michael Hammer, 2003]

BPM has the following characteristics:
i. Business Process Centric
focused on the promptness and efficiency of business process that accuracy of information
ii. Flexibility
Flexible adaptation to process change.
iii. Business Rule-Based
Business process automation defined by rule by process steps.
iv. Activity Monitoring
Clear monitoring of activity contents of people, information and system

2. Life cycle of BPM
1) Design
Process Design encompasses both the identification of existing processes and designing the "to-be" process. Areas of focus include: representation of the process flow, the actors within it, alerts & notifications, escalations, Standard Operating Procedures, Service Level Agreements, and task hand-over mechanisms.
Good design reduces the number of problems over the lifetime of the process. Whether or not existing processes are considered, the aim of this step is to ensure that a correct and efficient theoretical design is prepared.
The proposed improvement could be in human to human, human to system, and system to system workflows, and might target regulatory, market, or competitive challenges faced by the businesses.

2) Modeling
Modeling takes the theoretical design and introduces combinations of variables, for instance, changes in the cost of materials or increased rent, that determine how the process might operate under different circumstances.
It also involves running "what-if analysis" on the processes: What if I have 75% of resources to do the same task? What if I want to do the same job for 80% of the current cost?

3) Execution
One way to automate processes is to develop or purchase an application that executes the required steps of the process; however, in practice, these applications rarely execute all the steps of the process accurately or completely. Another approach is to use a combination of software and human intervention; however this approach is more complex, making documenting process difficult.
As a response to these problems, software has been developed that enables the full business process (as developed in the process design activity) to be defined in a computer language which can be directly executed by the computer. The system will either use services in connected applications to perform business operations (e.g. calculating a repayment plan for a loan) or, when a step is too complex to automate, will message a human requesting input. Compared to either of the previous approaches, directly executing a process definition can be more straightforward and therefore easier to improve. However, automating a process definition requires flexible and comprehensive infrastructure which typically rules out implementing these systems in a legacy IT environment.
Business rules have been used by systems to provide definitions for governing behavior, and a business rule engine can be used to drive process execution and resolution.
4) Monitoring
Monitoring encompasses the tracking of individual processes so that information on their state can be easily seen and statistics on the performance of one or more processes provided. An example of the tracking is being able to determine the state of a customer order (e.g. ordered arrived, awaiting delivery, invoice paid) so that problems in its operation can be identified and corrected.
In addition, this information can be used to work with customers and suppliers to improve their connected processes. Examples of the statistics are the generation of measures on how quickly a customer order is processed or how many orders were processed in the last month. These measures tend to fit into three categories: cycle time, defect rate and productivity.
The degree of monitoring depends on what information the business wants to evaluate and analyze and how business wants it to be monitored, in real-time or ad-hoc. Here, business activity monitoring (BAM) extends and expands the monitoring tools in generally provided by BPMS.
Process mining is a collection of methods and tools related to process monitoring. The aim of process mining is to analyze event logs extracted through process monitoring and to compare them with an a priori process model. Process mining allows process analysts to detect discrepancies between the actual process execution and the a priori model as well as to analyze bottlenecks.
5) Optimization
Process optimization includes retrieving process performance information from modeling or monitoring phase and identifying the potential or actual bottlenecks and potential rooms for cost savings or other improvements and then applying those enhancements in the design of the process thus continuing the value cycle of business process management.

3. Practice of BPM in actual industry.
Whilst the steps can be viewed as a cycle, economic or time constraints are likely to limit the process to one or more iterations.
In addition, organizations often start a BPM project or program with the objective to optimize an area which has been identified as an area for improvement.
In financial sector, BPM is critical to make sure the system delivers a quality service while the regulatory compliance is also not compromised.

4. References
1) Jorg Becker, Martin Kugeler, Michael Rosemann (Eds.) "Process Management" ISBN 3-540-43499-2
2) Roger Burlton Business Process Management: Profiting From Process. ISBN 0-672-32063-0
3) Peter Fingar, Steve Towers "In Search of BPM Excellence". ISBN 0-929-652401
4) James F. Chang "Business Process Management Systems" ISBN 0-8493-2310-X
5) Michael Harvey "Essential Business Process Modelling" ISBN 0-596-00843-0
6) Debevoise, Neilson T (2007 September 12). Business Process Management with a Business Rules Approach. BookSurge Publishing. ISBN 1-4196736-8-8.
7) Marlon Dumas, Wil van der Aalst, Arthur ter Hofstede (Eds) Process-Aware Information Systems, Wiley, ISBN 0-471-66306-9
8) Keith Harrison-Broninski "Human Interactions: The Heart and Soul of Business Process Management" ISBN 0-929652-44-4
9) John Jeston and Johan Nelis "Business Process Management: Practical Guidelines to Successful Implementations" ISBN 0-7506-6921-7
10) Martyn Ould "Business Process Management: A Rigorous Approach" ISBN 1-902505-60-3 North America ISBN 0-929652-27-4
11) Howard Smith, Peter Fingar. Business Process Management: The Third Wave. ISBN 0-929652-33-9 (hardcover) ISBN 0-929652-34-7 (paperback)
12) Peter Fingar. "Extreme Competition: Innovation And The Great 21st Century Business Reformation".ISBN 0-929652-38-2
13) Howard Smith, Peter Fingar. "IT Doesnt Matter: Business Processes Do". ISBN 0-929652-35-1
14) Michael Hugos. "The Greatest Innovation Since the Assembly Line: Powerful Strategies for Business Agility". ISBN 0-929652-39-9
15) Andrew Spanyi. "More for Less: The Power of Process Management". ISBN 0-929652-03-0
16) Andrew Spanyi. "Business Process Management Is a Team Sport: Play It to Win!". ISBN 0-929652-02-3
17) Kiran. K.Garimella. "The Power of Process: Unleashing the Source of Competitive Advantage". ISBN 0-929652-06-1
18) Peter Fingar, Joseph Bellini. "The Real Time Enterprise: Competing on Time With the Revolutionary Business Strategy-Execution Machine". ISBN 0-929652-30-4
19) Jean-Noel GILLOT. "La gestion des processus metiers".ISBN 978-2-9528-2660-0
20) Patrice BRIOL. "Ingenierie des processus metiers, de lelaboration a lexploitation". ISBN 978-1-4092-0040-6
21) Patrice BRIOL. "BPMN, the Business Process Modeling Notation, Pocket Handbook". ISBN 978-1-4092-0299-8
22) “BPM의 이해”,Tmax Soft 2004

5. Terminology
- Business Process and Business Process Modeling
- Business Process Automation
- Business-driven development (BDD)
- Business process interoperability
- Business rules approach
- Business intelligence
- Enterprise resource planning
- Event-driven Process Chains
- Performance management
- Process-driven application
- BPDM
- Workflow
- BPMN
- JBPM
- nexusBPM
- Six Sigma
- SUPER
- Total Quality Management
- XPDL
- YAWL
- BPEL
- Information security policies
- Service-Oriented Modeling Framework (SOMF)

6. Related Link
1) "Guidance for Industry : Part 11, Electronic Records; Electronic Signatures - Scope and Application”, Food and Drug Administration
2) "General Principles of Software Validation; Final Guidance for Industry and FDA Staff". Food and Drug Administration
3) "GUIDELINE ON GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF PROCESS VALIDATION". Food and Drug Administration
4) "Software validation for medical device manufacturing". The Quality Assurance Journal 7 (4): 242?247. Jones, Randy D. et al. (2003).
5) "Efficient system validation". Mettler Toledo
6) "21 CFR part 11 - overview". Gordon, C, Mettler Toledo.
7) "Validation of new clinical quantitative analysis software applicable in spine orthopaedic studies". Champain, S. et al. (2006).
8) "The Four Habits Coding Scheme: Validation of an instrument to assess clinicians’communication behavior". Krupat, Edward et al. (2006).
9) "Business Process Management in the Finance Sector", Oracle.com.

Categories: Business process | Information technology management | Process management