What is a BPMS
The type of information systems are process aware, and are so-called: Business Process Management Systems (BPMSs).
- Purpose: coordinate an automated business process in such a way that all work is done at the right time by the right resource.
What are the different types of BPMS
Types of BPMSs
• Production workflow systems:
- Work routed on basis of explicitly defined process descriptions
- E.g. IBM’s Business Process Manager or Bizagi’s BPM Suite
• Case handling systems:
- Use of implicit process models
- E.g. i-Sight’s Case Management Software or BPMOne
• Ad-hoc workflow systems:
- Allow on-the-fly process definitions
- E.g. TIBCO’s BusinessWorks or Comalatech’s Ad hoc Workflows or InConcert
• Groupware systems:
- Enable users to share documents and information
- E.g. IBM’s Lotus Notes
How does the executing engine work?
- Ability to create executable process instances (also called cases);
- Ability to distribute work to process participants in order to execute a business process from start to end;
- Ability to automatically retrieve and store data required for the execution of the process and to delegate (automated) activities to software applications across the organization.
Altogether, the engine is continuously monitoring the progress of different cases and coordinating which activities to work on next by generating work items, i.e. instances of process activities that need to be taken care of for specific cases.
What is process modeling tool?
- Ability for users to create and modify process models;
- Ability to annotate process models with additional data, such as data input and output, participants, business rules associated with activities, or performance measures associated with a process or an activity;
- Ability to store, share and retrieve process models from a process model repository.
A process model can be deployed to the engine in order to be executed.
The executing engine uses the process model to determine the temporal and logical order in which the activities of a process model have to be execited/
What is a worklist handler?
- Component of a BPMS through which process participants are offered work items and commit to these.
- The worklist handler of a BPMS can best be imagined as an inbox. Through an inbox, participants can see what work items are ready for them to be executed.
Check-out step: work item is selected and started by the participant from their worklist, the corresponding electronic form is rendered on the screen.
Check-in step: participants can then enter data into the form, and signal completion to the engine.
What is the externak service?
- Some of these activities can be performed fully automatically, i.e. execution engine calls external application
- The external application has to expose a service interface with which the engine can interact.
- The execution engine provides the invoked service with the necessary data it will need for performing the activity for a specific case.
- Administration and Monitoring Tools ?
• Actual availability of specific participants.
• Dealing with exceptional situations
• Monitoring performance of the business
The execution-related events recorded in this way are stored and can be exported in the form of execution logs.
Advantages
Advantages of BPMSs
1. Workload Reduction: BPMSs automates part of the work that is done by people in settings where such a system is not in place.
• Work-item transportation: It will take care of transporting work itself. In some cases the BPMS can take care of the entire process by invoking fully automated applications, called Straight-Through-Processing (STP).
• Coordination :
- the BPMS uses the process model for determining which activities need to be performed and in what order (it saves time).
- Another form of coordination, signalling of completed work(time saving, since signal of status).
• Information Provision: gathering of all relevant information to carry out a particular task. You can use the right information when you need it.
- Flexible Integration:
• From Data Centric Integration to Process Centric Integration
The BPMS has an increased flexibility that organizations achieve with this technology.
- BPMSs would enable organizations to become more flexible in managing and updating their business processes as well as their applications.
- It also provides the means to glue together separate systems.
- Execution Transparency:
BPMS must be accurate administration, actively monitoring and recording. However not necessary to keep all data available one the associated cases are completed.
Two types of administration of BPMS:
• Operational Information: relevant for the management of individual cases, participants, or specific parts of a business process. (it relates to recent, running cases)
• Historic Information: interest on a particular level of aggregation (relates to completed cases)
- Rule Enforcement:
When rules are explicitly enforced, this can be considered as a quality benefit: one does, what one promises.
• Order and causality
• Data constraints
• Resources constraints like separation of duty
The BPMS registers which individuals have carried out which work items and can take this information into account when allocating new work items.
Challenges
Technical Challenges
• Many applications have not been developed for coordinated use by a BPMS. Mostly, the systems are technically documented but there is no one of the original development team available anymore who knows exactly how these are structured.
– Hard to invoke systems
– Hard to determine when a work item has been completed
A technique to make interaction with such legacy systems are screen scraping.
- The interaction between a BPMS and the mainframe application then takes place on the level of the user interface.
- Low-level integration solutions will incur much rigidity to the overall solution and will, undermine the flexibility advantages that are normally associated with using a BPMS.
• Traditional systems and applications lack process orientation. The lack of process-awareness of traditional systems in the integration of existing applications.
– Supports batch processing rather than case-based work. This means that a particular task is executed for a potentially large set of cases, which does not always go well.
• Technical integration capabilities are improving, which lead to a more favourable use of BPMS and that technical challenges.
Organizational Challenges
• Implementing a BPMS requires a thorough process understanding; different stakeholders have to be balanced, getting insight into existing processes. Politic motivations play an role.
• Organizations are dynamic entities; organizational rules change, departments are scrapped, new products.
• BPMS may cause a big brother is watching feeling to workers
• Another fear that is common with end users is that their work will take on a mechanistic rait, almost as if they are working on a chain gang.
Better to go for gradual change than a big bang.
