Business Process Management or How to Improve the Efficiency of your Company?

Abzetdin Adamov, PhD
Department of Computer Systems and Networks
Qafqaz University, Baku, Azerbaijan
aadamov@qafqaz.edu.az

кандидат технических наук
Абзетдин Адамов

“To improve is to change; to be perfect is to change often.”
Winston Churchill

Abstract

Today’s economic reality is an ever increasing competition, informed and demanding customers, commoditization of products and services, and relentless pressure to cut costs. Companies are again being asked to do more with less. To improve the quality of service, internal business processes should be managed to reach the overall quality of the final product through controlling the quality of each intermediate product in the manufacturing industry. The Business Process Management (BPM) aims to improve processes. Business process management technologies are being adopted by more and more companies to improve the efficiency of both their internal processes and e-services offered to customers. BPM is the newest technology in the business and IT areas, and there is much more to know in order to understand how to implement it properly.

This article offers the findings from a study of the various management tools designed to facilitate the processes: Business Process Simulation and Modeling, Business Process Improvement and Reengineering and Business Process Execution Language that helps to interconnect services. At the end of this paper, several BPM software tools from different vendors to evaluate their general features are reviewed.

Keywords: Business Process Management, Business Process Modeling, Business Process Improvement, BPM, BPMN, BPI, BPEL.

Introduction

Unfortunately, in most organizations, people, processes, and systems are divided and isolated. This environment of stove-pipe operations makes it difficult to change at all, much less as quickly as necessary in order to react to changing market conditions [9]. Today it is more important than ever for executives to gain control of their operations and their resources, to gain a top-down view into their entire enterprise, and to be able to manage their activities in order to increase productivity and profitability. So the question remains: how do business and IT executives manage such a broad range of activities across the enterprise, and between the enterprise and their customers and partners? Can they really hope to bring order to complex business processes that require the coordination of greater amounts of people, information, and transactions? Today, there is a solution that can deliver the control and visibility that executives need to manage their organizations for success. That solution is business process management, or BPM — the aligning and coordinating of people, activities, and resources to achieve organizational goals.

Business Process Management is the conception, design, observation and continuous improvement of business processes. Companies are being asked to do more with less. Improved business performance is delivered by streamlining to remove inefficiency and redundancy that has evolved in a manually designed processes. In the wake of increasing global competition, the manufacturing environment has to continuously change in order for businesses to remain productive and efficient. A growing number of businesses are going multinational to strategically position themselves in global markets with worldwide manufacturing operations.

According to Gartner Analyst Jim Sinur in 2007, business organizations will save from 10 to 20% of the cost of a business process by simulating alternative new business flows, implementing model and optimizing them in BPM. He projected that enterprises that continue to hard code all flow control or insist on manual process steps, and which do not incorporate BPM’s benefits, will lose out on the agility and flexibility that is beginning to characterize 21st-century business [4]. BPM eliminates the stovepipes in an organization — bridges the gaps among people and systems, allowing organizations to automate, deploy, and modify business processes across the enterprise, align people and resources to achieve organizational goals, and connect the enterprise with customers and partners. As a result, executives at all levels of today’s enterprises are putting BPM at the top of their agendas. These enterprises are awakening to the sobering reality summarized by one leading analyst: “Do not expect to bypass this innovation-rich capability. BPM is not avoidable in the long run....consider what could happen if your No. 1 competitor gets the BPM message before you do.” [9].

Fundamentals of the BPM

The Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI – www.bpmi.org) has been established to promote and develop the use of Business Process Management (BPM) through the use of standards for process design, deployment, execution, maintenance, and optimization of processes. BPMI has developed three standards to facilitate BPM:

• BPMN, as a standard for modeling business processes,
• Business Process Modeling Language (BPML), as the standard business execution language, and
• Business Process Query Language (BPQL), a standard management interface for the deployment and execution of e-Business processes.

The very important feature of BPMI standards is that like to the functionality of relational data models and the generation of SQL/DDL statements, BPML can be manipulated directly and executable language created and made available for immediate execution. BPM is about unifying Business Process Modeling, Business Process Simulation, Workflow, Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) integration into a single standard. For management to understand the architecture, design, and deployment of processes, we need business process modeling and business execution language standards [14].

Process Design and Improvement Opportunities

In the wake of increasing global competition, the manufacturing environment has to continuously change in order for businesses to remain productive and efficient. A growing number of businesses are going multinational to strategically position themselves in global markets with worldwide manufacturing operations. Changing business conditions have prompted manufacturers to design equipments to accommodate new products without expensive retooling. This has enabled manufacturers to move into new markets and leave them just as quickly. These new markets impose demands for products to match specific consumer needs requiring customization of products or even altering an entire product line. Facilities are now being utilized whereby for new products, manufacturers could create prototypes in remarkably short durations. “Flexible manufacturing systems” techniques are being utilized which are enabling companies to offer lower costs, faster turnaround time and quality that meet or exceed customer expectations. Quality of products is more uniform and predictable with low wastage on scrap and rework and manufacturers are reaping benefits of greater flexibility and optimum utilization of production facilities and equipment. Consequently, we need to identify improvement opportunities in: Product quality, Material handling, Product design time, Manufacturing setups, and Factory and office overhead. We propose Integration and Standardization to facilitate these improvements [15].

In today’s ever-changing world, the only thing that doesn’t change is ‘change’ itself. In a world increasingly driven by the three Cs: Customer, Competition and Change, companies are on the lookout for new solutions for their business problems [17]. Recently, some of the more successful business corporations in the world seem to have hit upon an incredible solution: Business Process Reengineering (BPR).

“Reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed [17].” The key words in the preceding definition are the italicized ones. BPR advocates that enterprises go back to the basics and reexamine their very roots. It doesn’t believe in small improvements. Rather it aims at total reinvention. As for results: BPR is clearly not for companies who want a 10% improvement. It is for the ones that need a ten-fold increase. According to Hammer and Champy [18], the last but the most important of the four key words is the word-‘process.’ BPR focuses on processes and not on tasks, jobs or people. It endeavors to redesign the strategic and value added processes that transcend organizational boundaries.

Business Process Requirements

The various approaches for business process modeling and the tool sets implementing them have numerous features in common. They all try to capture which business tasks are going to be automated, where the automating system is going to be deployed, who will use it, and how it will integrate with other systems. In a nutshell, we find the following typical elements in a business process modeling language [9]:

• The organizational model describes the roles and areas of responsibilities within an organization with respect to the activities of a business process. It presents a more static view of a process.
• The control flow describes the order of execution and the dependencies among the various activities.
• The data flow describes how the business entities (or artifacts) are manipulated by the various activities.
• Use cases describe the context of a business process and its externally visible behavior.
• Collaboration diagrams can further document how business agents and artifacts work together to perform a function.

All this information together provides an accurate semiformal specification of the business process. In particular, the process requirements—when an activity executes, how often it will execute, and under what conditions it will end—can usually only be described informally in the form of use cases or textual descriptions in some natural language [16].

Business Process Simulation and Modeling

A model described using BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) is a logical description of how the business operates, from which business process languages can be generated. However for optimal results this approach should be used hand-in-hand with business process simulation [14].

The simulation model is also used to predict the performance of new designs incorporating the use of information technology. The approach is seen to have a number of advantages in the context of a public sector organization. These include the ability for personnel to move from a traditional grouping of staff in occupational groups with relationships defined by reporting requirements to a view of their role in a process, which delivers a performance to a customer. By running the simulation through time it is also possible to gauge how changes at an operational level can lead to the meeting of strategic targets over time [7].

Modelling the business process is an essential part of any software development process. It allows the analyst to capture the broad outline and procedures that govern what it is a business does. This model provides an overview of where the proposed software system being considered will fit into the organisational structure and daily activities. It may also provide the justification for building the system by capturing the current manual and automated procedures that will be rolled up into a new system, and the associated cost benefit. As the Business Process Model typically has a broader and more inclusive range than just the software system being considered, it also allows the analyst to clearly map what is in the scope of the proposed system and what will be implemented in other ways (eg. a manual process). A business process model typically defines the following elements [10]:

• The Goal or reason for the process;
• Specific inputs;
• Specific outputs;
• Resources consumed;
• Activities that are performed in some order;
• Events that drive the process.

Business Process Improvement (Re-engineering)

Most business executives remember business-process reengineering efforts during the 1990s, the attempt to overhaul and automate processes by using information technology such as workflow software. In some cases productivity and efficiency were improved; but in many cases, companies just automated bad processes rather than really taking the time to plan out what they wanted to accomplish, and how best to use information technology to accomplish it [9].

BPI – Business Process Improvement – has been defined as “the critical analysis and radical redesign of existing processes to achieve breakthrough improvements in performance measures (such as cost reduction, time reduction or quality improvement).”

BPI requires taking a broad view of both information technology and business activity, and of the relationships between them. Information technology should be viewed as more than an automating or mechanising force: it can fundamentally reshape the way business is done. Business activities should be seen as more than a collection of individual or even functional tasks: by taking a process view to maximise effectiveness. (Information technology and BPI have a recursive relationship. Information technology capabilities should support business processes, and business processes should be developed in terms of the capabilities which the enabling technology can provide.). A general model of BPI involves the following steps [11]:

• Develop the Business Vision and Process Objectives:
• Identify the Processes to be Improved:
• Understand and Measure the Existing Processes:
• Identify Information Technology Levers:
• Design and Build a Prototype of the New Process:

Business Process Improvement, a revolutionary new approach to analyzing traditional business processes, fuses information technology and human resource management. When effective, Business Process Improvement (BPI) can dramatically improve business performance.

A cornerstone to effective Business Process Improvement’s dramatic results is information technology – a largely untapped resource, but a crucial “enabler” of Business Process Improvement. In turn, only a challenge like BPI affords maximum use of information technology’s potential.

The following definition can be used in terms of describing general Business Process Improvement: “BPI is the re-design of existing business operations to achieve significant production improvement.”

A key to achieving successful Document Automation Business Process Improvement is focusing on the business requirement of the solution and not the technology used to facilitate the solution. Projects will fail when technology has not been analyzed properly and built into a solid business solution for a new process. One should not look to re-engineer a process to implement a technology, but use a technology as component to process improvement [12].

Business Process Execution Language

The new breed of Business Process Modeling Languages include the Business Process Execution Language for Web Services (BPEL4WS), created through a joint effort of BEA, IBM, and Microsoft, and the Business Process Modeling Language (BPML) created by BPMI.ORG. Both of the standards provide specifications for [14]:

• Dataflow
• Messages
• Events
• Business Rules
• Exceptions
• Transactions (Distributed, Compensating, Synchronous, Asynchronous).

There is a constant pressure for businesses to interconnect their applications. This is what is driving the adoption of web services and SOA as an enterprise solution for reducing the cost and complexity of integration initiatives. Making web services work is a two-step process: first you publish and then you orchestrate. Publish means taking a part of a existing system and exposing it as a service. Orchestrate means composing multiple discrete services into an end-to-end process flow. BPEL is the industry standard for orchestration. The goal of BPEL is provide a richer and yet simpler abstraction for addressing most important requirements (binding to heterogeneous system, data manipulation, flow coordination, exception management, etc.) [20].

Business Process Management Tools

The BPI software marketplace is currently going through a stage that holds the promise of enhanced capabilities for users of both low and high-end re-engineering tools. There are currently more than 50 programs available ranging from $15,000 simulation and modeling packages to $600 flowcharting packages. Software reviewers and analysts argue endlessly about relative strengths and weaknesses of various approaches, but they all seem to agree on one thing. There is no single product that can deliver all the BPI tools current users want. Integration is a key as users seek to flexibly model, visualize, analyze, simulate and implement the processes they are re-engineering [12].

Currently, middleware providers offer some form of workflow or business process management software. But it’s typically a task that requires huge resources and programming skills, especially in simulations with applications from several vendors and multiple, independent processes that must be coordinate.

Intalio, a nearly four-year-old company specializing in BPM, may have cracked the code for ridding BPM of its rough edges and steep costs. The company’s Intalio 2.0 software can reduce the development cost of designing and implementing business processes by up to 75 percent. That reduction comes primarily through eliminating the need form manual coding and by treating processes-not just data and applications-us the fundamental building blocks of corporate information systems [13].

Business Processes and Software Solutions

BPM technology provides not only the tools and infrastructure to define, simulate, and analyze business process models, but also the tools to implement business processes in such a way that the execution of the resulting software artifacts can be managed from a business process perspective [3].

Implementing Business Process Management (BPM) technology offers significant opportunity for automation and efficiency gains and return-on-investment across a wide range of business needs and functions, including accounts payable, procurement, human resources, order management and more [4].

In addition, BPM systems will need to represent business processes in the computer system so they can be directly manipulated by business analysts – not programmers or development staff. It has been argued that one of the major issues that contributes to the high failure rate in business change projects is a lack of tools for evaluating the effects of design solutions before implementation [6]. The ability to modify processes to respond to market forces or regulatory changes, while retaining control over existing process instances, is one of the key strengths of BPM software [1].

The rest part of this paper devote to BPM software tools such as, IBM WebSphere, Intalio BPMS Designer and Oracle Business Process Management:

IBM WebSphere

The IBM WebSphere J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition) environment provides the basic facilities for implementing business components and the tooling to make those services available as Web services. Using WebSphere tooling, Java components such as EJBs (Enterprise JavaBeans) can be rendered as WSDL-defined Web services that are accessible through the WebSphere SOAP gateway. And for any given WSDL-defined Web service, Java wrappers can be generated that make the service accessible to any WebSphere intraenterprise business component. This provides the basic machinery for publishing intraenterprise business components as Web services and for using external Web services as components in intraenterprise processes [3].

Intalio BPMS Designer

Intalio is the leader in open source BPM space and is positioned to take over the existing competition space in the open source arena. Often, with all types and sizes of organizations that are looking for better ways to achieve their Business process modelling and Business process interoperability, simulations and architecture to back office and legacy systems, it is often a requirement that the tools people use should be easily adopted and integrated, while still providing the necessary enterprise capabilities for back office and legacy system integration with such standards as BPEL and BPEL4PEOPLE. Intalio's platform including the designer, BPEL engine and connectors are designed to take out the risk association with the perception of using such as platform [22]:

• Intalio is standards based – BPEL 2.0, BPMN, XForms, WSDL. Intalio adopts the latest standards in the marketplace.
• Intalio's commitment – Intalio has been around almost 8 years and has only focused on BPM.
• Business and IT alignment – The fact that Intalio has zero code that can be used both by business analyst and IT personnel provide business with real capability and understanding of what they want.
• Full capability of product – Because Intalio is open source, there problem of a heavy investment upfront and shelfware is drastically reduced.
• Enterprise strength – Scalability is of concern to many, and at the Enterprise level, Intalio has proven that it works in very large environments such as the Dutch Government
• Support for existing platforms – Intalio BPMS & BPMN support a wide range of application servers such as Websphere, JBoss, Sun and leverages your existing assets.
• Training – OpenSoft develops and customizes Training to provide specific needs to organizations and businesses across a broad spectrum of requirements.

The software provides a visual interface for designing end-to-end business processes, including messaging, data transformation, transactions, and business rules. Existing business process models, procedures and rules can be improved and exposed for use within the Intalio environxment without writing code.

Oracle Business Process Management

The Oracle Business Process Management represents the methodology framework for BPM projects at enterprises. This framework can be refined and broken down into more granular tasks, which eventually describe best practices for business process management approaches. Oracle describes a lifecycle for BPM projects, which was developed along multiple projects and directly influenced Oracle Business Process Management. The following 6 steps are fundamental for successful BPM projects and are promoted as Oracle Business Process Management is deployed [19]:

1. Model & Simulate
   1. Model & Simulate Business Requirements to Analyze your Business Processes
2. Implement & Deploy, Execute
   1. Generate an Outline Model of Business Requirements & Business Process
   2. Use Tools to Integrate the Business Process with Interfaces or Services of Existing Systems & Applications
   3. Implement Business Process; Define Business Rules Associated with Process; and Map Data
3. Monitor & Optimize
   1. Make Processes visible for End Users; Monitor

The Oracle Business Process Management Suite includes:

• The industry leading modeling and simulation engine – Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite, which shares the same metadata format with the process execution engine, for business and IT to seamlessly collaborate
• The top selling process execution engine – Oracle BPEL Process Manager, for human - workflow and application - driven integration tasks with BPEL, part of the Oracle SOA Suite
• The tightly integrated rules engine – Oracle Business Rules, which allows business users to design their own policies, which is part of the Oracle SOA Suite
• The highly intuitive process monitoring solution – Oracle Business Activity Monitoring, which captures executed process data in real time and feeds that data back into the simulation engine for real-world planning, also part of the Oracle SOA Suite [19].

Conclusion

However, a feature of process management remains that of a focus on business processes, with the optimum arrangement of these processes and tasks within the organisation considered to be a critical design variable determining the efficiency of the resulting structure [5].

It’s important to keep in mind that this process will be managed by people. A business process should not be very rigid; neither should it be too open ended. There should bee some room for innovation within the process as well as that is the business process can be improved over a period of time. It is imperative to remember that Business Process Management is suppose to save time and resources in an organization and should be approached with that principle in mind.

According to Ismael Chang Ghalimi (creator of BPMI.org), a future BPMS must support both process design and process execution; therefore, a simple process modeling tool with process simulation capabilities doesn't qualify as a BPM 2.0 product. A BPMS must support both Web service orchestration and human workflow interactions. You can think of it as two sides of the same coin—one facing back-end IT systems, the other facing front-end human beings. As a result, and at a bare minimum, a complete BPMS has three main components: a process design tool, a process execution runtime, and a workflow user interface [21].

Glossary

BPM – Business Process Management
BPMS – Business Process Management System
BPMN – Business Process Modeling Notation
BPMI – Business Process Management Initiative
BPML – Business Process Modeling Language
BPEL – Business Process Execution Language
BPEL4WS – Business Process Execution Language for Web Services
BPEL4PEOPLE – Business Process Execution Language for People
BPQL – Business Process Query Language
BPI – Business Process Improvement
EAI – Enterprise Application Integration
SOA – Service Oriented Architecture
UML – Unified Modeling Language
OMG – Object Management Group
WSDL – Web Service Definition Language
SOAP – Simple Object Access Protocol

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