Business process modeling (BPM) in

business process management Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business p ...

and systems engineering is the activity of representing processes of an enterprise, so that the current

business processes A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a parti ...

may be analyzed, improved, and automated. BPM is typically performed by business analysts, who provide expertise in the modeling discipline; by subject matter experts, who have specialized knowledge of the processes being modeled; or more commonly by a team comprising both. Alternatively, the process model can be derived directly from events' logs using

process mining Process mining is a family of techniques relating the fields of data science and process management to support the analysis of operational processes based on event logs. The goal of process mining is to turn event data into insights and actions. P ...

tools. The business objective is often to increase process speed or reduce cycle time; to increase quality; or to reduce costs, such as labor, materials, scrap, or capital costs. In practice, a management decision to invest in business process modeling is often motivated by the need to document requirements for an

information technology Information technology (IT) is the use of computers to create, process, store, retrieve, and exchange all kinds of Data (computing), data . and information. IT forms part of information and communications technology (ICT). An information te ...

project. Change management programs are typically involved to put any improved business processes into practice. With advances in software design, the vision of BPM models becoming fully executable (and capable of simulations and round-trip engineering) is coming closer to reality.

History

Techniques to model business process such as the

flow chart A flowchart is a type of diagram that represents a workflow or process. A flowchart can also be defined as a diagrammatic representation of an algorithm, a step-by-step approach to solving a task. The flowchart shows the steps as boxes of v ...

functional flow block diagram A functional flow block diagram (FFBD) is a multi-tier, time-sequenced, step-by-step flow diagram of a system’s functional flow. The term "functional" in this context is different from its use in functional programming or in mathematics, where p ...

control flow diagram A control-flow diagram (CFD) is a diagram to describe the control flow of a business process, process or review. Control-flow diagrams were developed in the 1950s, and are widely used in multiple engineering disciplines. They are one of the cla ...

Gantt chart A Gantt chart is a type of bar chart that illustrates a project schedule, named after its popularizer, Henry Gantt (1861–1919), who designed such a chart around the years 1910–1915. Modern Gantt charts also show the dependency relationshi ...

PERT Pert or PERT may refer to: Ships * - see List of United States Navy ships: P * , a World War II corvette, originally HMS ''Nepeta'' * ''Pert'' (sidewheeler), a 19th-century steamboat that operated in British Columbia, Canada Statistics * PE ...

diagram, and

IDEF IDEF, initially an abbreviation of ICAM Definition and renamed in 1999 as Integration Definition,IEEE Standard for Functional Modeling Language—Syntax and Semantics for IDEF0, Software Engineering Standards Committee of the IEEE Computer Soci ...

have emerged since the beginning of the 20th century. The Gantt charts were among the first to arrive around 1899, the flow charts in the 1920s, Functional Flow Block Diagram and PERT in the 1950s, Data Flow Diagrams and IDEF in the 1970s. Among the modern methods are

Unified Modeling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

and Business Process Model and Notation. Still, these represent just a fraction of the methodologies used over the years to document business processes.Thomas Dufresne & James Martin (2003)
"Process Modeling for E-Business"
INFS 770 Methods for Information Systems Engineering: Knowledge Management and E-Business. Spring 2003 The term 'business process modeling' was coined in the 1960s in the field of systems engineering by S. Williams in his 1967 article 'Business Process Modelling Improves Administrative Control'. His idea was that techniques for obtaining a better understanding of physical control systems could be used in a similar way for

business process A business process, business method or business function is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment in which a specific sequence produces a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a parti ...

es. It was not until the 1990s that the term became popular. In the 1990s the term '

process A process is a series or set of activities that interact to produce a result; it may occur once-only or be recurrent or periodic. Things called a process include: Business and management *Business process, activities that produce a specific se ...

' became a new productivity paradigm.Asbjørn Rolstadås (1995). "Business process modeling and re-engineering". in: ''Performance Management: A Business Process Benchmarking Approach''. p. 148-150. Companies were encouraged to think in ''processes'' instead of ''functions'' and ''procedures''. Process thinking looks at the chain of events in the company from purchase to supply, from order retrieval to sales, etc. The traditional modeling tools were developed to illustrate time and cost, while modern tools focus on cross-functional activities. These cross-functional activities have increased significantly in number and importance, due to the growth of complexity and dependence. New methodologies include business process redesign, business process innovation,

, integrated business planning, among others, all "aiming at improving processes across the traditional functions that comprise a company". In the field of

software engineering Software engineering is a systematic engineering approach to software development. A software engineer is a person who applies the principles of software engineering to design, develop, maintain, test, and evaluate computer software. The term '' ...

, the term 'business process modeling' opposed the common

software process In software engineering, a software development process is a process of dividing software development work into smaller, parallel, or sequential steps or sub-processes to improve design, product management. It is also known as a software devel ...

modeling, aiming to focus more on the state of the practice during software development. In that time (the early 1990s) all existing and new modeling techniques to illustrate business processes were consolidated as 'business process modeling languages'. In the Object Oriented approach, it was considered to be an essential step in the specification of business application systems. Business process modeling became the base of new methodologies, for instance, those that supported data collection, data flow analysis, process flow diagrams, and reporting facilities. Around 1995, the first visually oriented tools for business process modeling and implementation were being presented.

Topics

Business model

A business model is a framework for creating economic, social, and/or other forms of value. The term 'business model' is thus used for a broad range of informal and formal descriptions to represent core aspects of a business, including purpose, offerings, strategies, infrastructure, organizational structures, trading practices, and operational processes and policies. In the most basic sense, a business model is a method of doing business by which a company can sustain itself. That is, generate revenue. The business model spells-out how a company makes money by specifying where it is positioned in the

value chain A value chain is a progression of activities that a firm operating in a specific industry performs in order to deliver a valuable product (i.e., good and/or service) to the end customer. The concept comes through business management and was fir ...

Business process

is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks that produce a specific service or product (serve a particular goal) for a particular customer or customers. There are three main types of business processes: # Management processes, that govern the operation of a system. Typical management processes include

corporate governance Corporate governance is defined, described or delineated in diverse ways, depending on the writer's purpose. Writers focused on a disciplinary interest or context (such as accounting, finance, law, or management) often adopt narrow definitions ...

and strategic management. # Operational processes, that constitute the core business and create the primary value stream. Typical operational processes are purchasing,

manufacturing Manufacturing is the creation or production of goods with the help of equipment, labor, machines, tools, and chemical or biological processing or formulation. It is the essence of secondary sector of the economy. The term may refer to ...

marketing Marketing is the process of exploring, creating, and delivering value to meet the needs of a target market in terms of goods and services; potentially including selection of a target audience; selection of certain attributes or themes to emph ...

, and

sales Sales are activities related to selling or the number of goods sold in a given targeted time period. The delivery of a service for a cost is also considered a sale. The seller, or the provider of the goods or services, completes a sale in ...

. # Supporting processes, that support the core processes. Examples include accounting, recruitment, and

technical support Technical support (abbreviated as tech support) is a call centre type customer service provided by companies to advise and assist registered users with issues concerning their technical products. Traditionally done on the phone, technical suppor ...

. A business process can be decomposed into several sub-processes, which have their own attributes but also contribute to achieving the goal of the super-process. The analysis of business processes typically includes the mapping of processes and sub-processes down to activity level. A business process model is a

model A model is an informative representation of an object, person or system. The term originally denoted the plans of a building in late 16th-century English, and derived via French and Italian ultimately from Latin ''modulus'', a measure. Models c ...

of one or more business processes and defines the ways in which operations are carried out to accomplish the intended objectives of an organization. Such a model remains an abstraction and depends on the intended use of the model. It can describe the workflow or the integration between business processes. It can be constructed in multiple levels. A

workflow A workflow consists of an orchestrated and repeatable pattern of activity, enabled by the systematic organization of resources into processes that transform materials, provide services, or process information. It can be depicted as a sequence o ...

is a depiction of a sequence of operations, declared as work of a person, of a simple or complex mechanism, of a group of persons, of an organization of staff, or of machines. The workflow may be seen as any abstraction of real work, segregated into workshare, work split or other types of ordering. For control purposes, the workflow may be a view of real work under a chosen aspect.

Artifact-centric business process

The

artifact-centric business process model Artifact-centric business process model represents an operational business process model, model of business processes in which the changes and evolution of business data, or Business entity (computer science), business entities, are considered as t ...

has emerged as a holistic approach for modeling business processes, as it provides a highly flexible solution to capture operational specifications of business processes. It particularly focuses on describing the data of business processes, known as "artifacts", by characterizing business-relevant data objects, their life-cycles, and related services. The artifact-centric process modelling approach fosters the automation of the business operations and supports the flexibility of the workflow enactment and evolution.

Tools

Business process modelling tools provide business users with the ability to model their business processes, implement and execute those models, and refine the models based on as-executed data. As a result, business process modelling tools can provide transparency into business processes, as well as the centralization of corporate business process models and execution metrics.Workflow/Business Process Management (BPM) Service Pattern
June 27, 2007. Accessed 29 nov 2008. Modelling tools may also enable collaborate modelling of complex processes by users working in teams, where users can share and simulate models collaboratively. Business process modelling tools should not be confused with business process automation systems - both practices have modeling the process as the same initial step and the difference is that process automation gives you an ‘executable diagram’ and that is drastically different from traditional graphical business process modelling tools.

Modelling and simulation

Modelling and simulation functionality allows for pre-execution "what-if" modelling and simulation. Post-execution optimization is available based on the analysis of actual as-performed metrics. *

Use case diagram A use case diagram is a graphical depiction of a user's possible interactions with a system. A use case diagram shows various use cases and different types of users the system has and will often be accompanied by other types of diagrams as well. Th ...

s created by

Ivar Jacobson Ivar Hjalmar Jacobson (born 1939) is a Swedish computer scientist and software engineer, known as major contributor to UML, Objectory, Rational Unified Process (RUP), aspect-oriented software development and Essence. Biography Ivar Jacobson w ...

, 1992 (integrated in

UML The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

) *

Activity diagram Activity diagrams are graphical representations of workflows of stepwise activities and actions with support for choice, iteration and concurrency. In the Unified Modeling Language, activity diagrams are intended to model both computational and o ...

s (also adopted by UML) Some business process modelling techniques are: * Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) * Life-cycle Modelling Language (LML) * Subject-oriented business process management (S-BPM) * Cognition enhanced Natural language Information Analysis Method (CogNIAM) * Extended Business Modelling Language (xBML) *

Event-driven process chain An event-driven process chain (EPC) is a type of flow chart for business process modeling. EPC can be used to configure enterprise resource planning execution, and for business process improvement. It can be used to control an autonomous workflow ...

(EPC) * ICAM DEFinition (

IDEF0 IDEF0, a compound acronym ("Icam DEFinition for Function Modeling", where ICAM is an acronym for "Integrated Computer Aided Manufacturing"), is a function modeling methodology for describing manufacturing functions, which offers a functional model ...

) *

Unified Modelling Language The Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose, developmental modeling language in the field of software engineering that is intended to provide a standard way to visualize the design of a system. The creation of UML was originally m ...

(UML), extensions for business process *

Formalized Administrative Notation (FAN) Formalized administrative notation (FAN) is a method that enables administrators of various organizations to describe the flow and sequence of operations, identify their responsibilities, define and integrate their transactions etc. Its objective ...

* Harbarian process modeling (HPM)

Programming language tools

BPM suite software provides programming interfaces (web services, application program interfaces (APIs)) which allow enterprise applications to be built to leverage the BPM engine. This component is often referenced as the ''engine'' of the BPM suite. Programming languages that are being introduced for BPM include: * Business Process Execution Language (

BPEL The Web Services Business Process Execution Language (WS-BPEL), commonly known as BPEL (Business Process Execution Language), is an OASIS standard executable language for specifying actions within business processes with web services. Process ...

), *

Web Services Choreography Description Language Service choreography in business computing is a form of service composition in which the interaction protocol between several partner services is defined from a global perspective. The idea underlying the notion of service choreography can be summa ...

( WS-CDL). * XML Process Definition Language (

XPDL The XML Process Definition Language (XPDL) is a format standardized by the Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC) to interchange business process definitions between different workflow products, i.e. between different modeling tools and management su ...

), Some vendor-specific languages: * Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS) supports EPC, *

Java Process Definition Language jBPM (Java Business Process Model) is an open-source workflow engine written in Java (programming language), Java that can execute business processes described in BPMN 2.0 (or its own process definition language jPDL in earlier versions). jBPM ...

( JBPM), Other technologies related to business process modelling include

model-driven architecture Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is a software design approach for the development of software systems. It provides a set of guidelines for the structuring of specifications, which are expressed as models. Model Driven Architecture is a kind of doma ...

and

service-oriented architecture In software engineering, service-oriented architecture (SOA) is an architectural style that focuses on discrete services instead of a monolithic design. By consequence, it is also applied in the field of software design where services are provide ...

Related concepts

Business reference model

business reference model Business reference model (BRM) is a reference model, concentrating on the functional and organizational aspects of the core business of an enterprise, service organization or government agency. In enterprise engineering a business reference mode ...

is a reference model, concentrating on the functional and organizational aspects of an enterprise, service organization or government agency. In general a reference model is a model of something that embodies the basic goal or idea of something and can then be looked at as a reference for various purposes. A business reference model is a means to describe the business operations of an organization, independent of the organizational structure that perform them. Other types of business reference model can also depict the relationship between the business processes, business functions, and the business area's business reference model. These reference models can be constructed in layers, and offer a foundation for the analysis of service components, technology, data, and performance. The most familiar business reference model is the Business Reference Model of the US federal government. That model is a function-driven framework for describing the business operations of the federal government independent of the agencies that perform them. The Business Reference Model provides an organized, hierarchical construct for describing the day-to-day business operations of the federal government. While many models exist for describing organizations –

organizational chart An organizational chart, also called organigram, organogram, or organizational breakdown structure (OBS) is a diagram that shows the structure of an organization and the relationships and relative ranks of its parts and positions/jobs. The term ...

s, location maps, etc. – this model presents the business using a functionally driven approach.FEA Consolidated Reference Model Document
. Oct 2007.

Business process integration

A business model, which may be considered an elaboration of a business process model, typically shows business data and business organizations as well as business processes. By showing business processes and their information flows, a business model allows business stakeholders to define, understand, and validate their business enterprise. The

data model A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. For instance, a data model may specify that the data element representing a car be c ...

part of the business model shows how business information is stored, which is useful for developing

software code A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to execute. Computer programs are one component of software, which also includes documentation and other intangible components. A computer program ...

. See the figure on the right for an example of the interaction between business process models and data models.Paul R. Smith & Richard Sarfaty (1993)
Creating a strategic plan for configuration management using Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) tools.
Paper For 1993 National DOE/Contractors and Facilities CAD/CAE User's Group. Usually a business model is created after conducting an interview, which is part of the

business analysis Business analysis is a professional discipline of identifying business needs and determining solutions to business problems. Solutions often include a software-systems development component, but may also consist of process improvements, organiza ...

process. The interview consists of a facilitator asking a series of questions to extract information about the subject business process. The interviewer is referred to as a facilitator to emphasize that it is the participants, not the facilitator, who provide the business process information. Although the facilitator should have some knowledge of the subject business process, but this is not as important as the mastery of a pragmatic and rigorous method interviewing business experts. The method is important because for most enterprises a team of facilitators is needed to collect information across the enterprise, and the findings of all the interviewers must be compiled and integrated once completed. Business models are developed as defining either the current state of the process, in which case the final product is called the "as is" snapshot model, or a concept of what the process should become, resulting in a "to be" model. By comparing and contrasting "as is" and "to be" models the business analysts can determine if the existing business processes and information systems are sound and only need minor modifications, or if reengineering is required to correct problems or improve efficiency. Consequently, business process modeling and subsequent analysis can be used to fundamentally reshape the way an enterprise conducts its operations.

Business process re-engineering

Business process reengineering (BPR) aims to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the processes that exist within and across organizations. It examines business processes from a "clean slate" perspective to determine how best to construct them. Business process re-engineering (BPR) began as a private sector technique to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work. A key stimulus for re-engineering has been the development and deployment of sophisticated information systems and networks. Leading organizations use this technology to support innovative business processes, rather than refining current ways of doing work.Business Process Reengineering Assessment Guide
, United States General Accounting Office, May 1997.

Business process management

Business process management Business process management (BPM) is the discipline in which people use various methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes. Any combination of methods used to manage a company's business p ...

is a field of

management Management (or managing) is the administration of an organization, whether it is a business, a nonprofit organization, or a Government agency, government body. It is the art and science of managing resources of the business. Management includ ...

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.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Business Process Modelling