What is a business process?
A business process is a collection of activities, events, and decisions that collectively lead to an outcome that brings value to an organizations’ customers.
Business Process Management (BPM)
BPM is a body of methods, tools and techniqueto redesign, discover, analyze and execute business processes. It looks at the entire chain of events, activites and decisions.
Categories of a business process
- Order-to-cash: starts with customer placing an order and finishes with payment
- Quote-to-order: customer requesting a price quote and ends with placing order.
- Procure-to payment: starts with determination that a given product or service needs to be purchased, ends with delivery and payment.
- Issue-to-resolution: customer raises an issue, both agree that issue has been resolveed
- Application-to-approval: customer applies for a privilege, ends with approval/denial
Ingredients of a business process
- Events happen instantenously, they have no duration and they trigger a set of activites
- Activites have duration
- Decision points are points in time when a decision is made that affects business processes
- The execution of a process leads to an outcome
BPM lifecycle
- Process identification
- discovery
- analysis
- redesign
- implementation
- monitoring and controlling
Role of Algorithms
- assign tasks
- make processes more efficient
- can reduce costs
Business process modelling and notation BPMN
Cirles - events (arrival of equipment) begin with noun end with verb in past participle
Rectangles- activities (inspecting equipment) begin with verb
Decision points (returning or keeping equipment)
Tokens
Tokens are depicted as a colored dot on top of a process model. They show the progress of a given instance of the process.
Gateways
A gating mechanism that allows or disallows the passage of a token.
As tokens arrive at a gateway they are either merged on input or split on output.
Why is XOR gateway used?
To model exlusive decisions
Whys is AND gateway used?
To model parallel execution
Why is the OR gateway used?
To model inclusive decision
More than one outcome can occur at a given time
Use only if XOR and AND don’t suffice
Resources
Resources are anything or anyone involved in the performance of an acticity such as equipment, software, participants.
Pools
- Generally used for resource classes
- Business parties, such as seller, buyer, supplier, etc.
Lanes
- Used to partition a pool into different classes
- Department, business unit, team, software system, etc.
Data perspective
- Indicates which artifacts are required to perform an activity
- Indicates which artifiacts are produced by an activity
Data objects
- Information flowing in and out of activites
- Can be physical or electronic
- Document with upper right corner folded
Data stores
- A place containing data objects (magazin)
- Cylinder
How is Token affected by data objects?
- Input data objects are required for an activity to be executed
- Output data objects only affect a token flow indirectly
Reason for modelling a process
To better understand the process and to identify and prevent issues.
What are ARCs?
ARCs- sequence flows, represented by arrows with a full arrow-head
Lables
Names given to activities and events. Avoid lables with more than 5 words exluding prepositions and conjunctions.
What is the difference between a process model and a process instance?
A process model depicts all the possible ways a business process can be executed, while a process instance captures one specific process execution out of all possible ones.
How do pools interact?
Through message flows which can be directly attached to the boundary of a pool, should the details of the interaction not be relevant.
