Analysis of Business Process Modeling Techniques to Model Informational Process Perspective.

Tripti Negi, Veena Bansal IIT Kanpur, Kanpur Abstract: A business process modeling technique models four perspectives of business processes, namely: functional, behavioral, informational and organizational. Depending upon objective of modeling, an appropriate modeling technique is selected. For automation and integration using ERP, informational perspective of business processes is most important. We analyze business process modeling techniques like IDEF0, IDEF3, Role Activity Diagram, Activity diagram, Data flow diagram, Event-driven Process Chain diagram (EPC) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) to find out a technique that best captures informational perspective of a process along with other process perspectives. The study shows that IDEF3, RAD, and Activity diagram do not capture informational process perspective whereas IDEF0 captures it to a limited extent. Out of the remaining three techniques (DFD, EPC BPMN), DFD does not model the behavioral and organizational process perspective. Thus, EPC and BPMN are the only two modeling techniques that capture informational perspective. However, for BPMN modeling informational perspective is optional. EPC is the only modeling technique that captures informational process perspective along with functional, behavioral and organizational perspective. Extended Abstract A business process is defined as (Hammer 1993): A set of coordinated tasks and activities that adds value to its input to produce an output for a particular customer or market. A Business Process Model (BPM) is an abstract representation of a business process and it closely replicates reality (Yusuf 1996). Stakeholders (customers, owners, management, etc) use business process models for different purpose. For example, understanding, communicating, improving, developing, automating, managing or executing a process. The modeling technique that best matches the focus or objective should be selected (Giaglis 2001). Depending upon the focus of a modeling technique it should be capable of providing information elements to its users. These elements include, for instance (Giaglis 2001) What activities constitute a process? Who performs these activities? What data elements are required? When and where these activities are performed. How these activities are executed? To provide the above-mentioned information, a business process modeling technique should be capable of representing one or more following process perspectives (Curtis, 1992):

Functional: Represents what activities are being performed. Behavioral: Represents when and how activities are performed. Organizational: Represents where and by whom activities are performed. Informational: It represents informational entities (data) produced or manipulated by a process and its interrelationship.

It turns out that for automation, informational perspective of the organization is most important. A study by Kock and McQueen (1996) shows that in manufacturing organizations approximately 80 percent of what flows among business processes is information, while the other 20 percent is material. In a service organization, almost 100 percent flow consists of data and information. Data is thus an important constituent of business processes and one need to look at how data is defined, created, modified and used in an organization. However, most of the presently available business process modeling techniques analyzes a business process as a set of interrelated activities, primarily focusing on the functional aspect of a process. It pays very little or no attention to the data/information flow and its interaction in a business process, thus neglecting the informational aspect of a process while modeling (Kock 1996; 2001). We model Sales and Order process to analyze various process modeling techniques. This process creates a sales order for a customer. Then the availability of the items is checked, if available the material is packed and dispatched updating the inventory. Customer invoice is created and the financial records are updated. If ordered items are not available, the notification is sent to the customer. Here, popular modeling techniques namely Data Flow diagram (DFD) (Yourdan 1989) IDEF family of languages (IDEF0, IDEF3) (Mayer 1995), Role Activity Diagram (RAD), Activity Diagram, Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) (Scheer 1999) and Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) (White 2004) are studied. These process modeling techniques are evaluated for their strength in capturing informational process perspective along with other perspectives for a process. The results of the analysis are shown in table 1. BPM technique IDEF0 IDEF3 DFD RAD Activity Diagram EPC BPMN Functional Process Perspectives Behavioral Organizational Informational Limited No Yes No No Yes Yes

Yes No Limited Yes Limited No Yes No No Yes No Yes Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Table 1: Modeling Perspective

The modeling techniques that captures informational perspective along with other perspectives are of interest. IDEF3, RAD, and Activity diagram do not capture informational process perspective whereas IDEF0 captures it to a limited extent. Thus, these four techniques are not considered for analysis. Out of the remaining three techniques (DFD, EPC BPMN), DFD does not model the behavioral and organizational process perspective. Hence, EPC and BPMN are the only two modeling techniques that capture all the four process perspectives. However, for BPMN, modeling the informational process perspective is optional. Thus, EPC is the only technique that captures informational process perspective with other process perspectives. We will use EPC to model a business process to compute its complexity as a future work. References 1. Curtis, W., Kellner, M.I., Over, J., 1992, Process Modelling, Communications of the ACM, 35(9), pp. 75-90. 2. Giaglis, G.M., 2001, A Taxonomy of Business Process Modeling and Information Systems Modeling Techniques, International Journal of Flexible Manufacturing Systems, 13(2), pp. 209-228. 3. Hammer, Michael and Champy, James (1993), Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution, Harper Business, NewYork. 4. Kock, N.F., McQueen, R.J., (1996), Product flow, Breadth and Complexity of Business Processes: An Empirical Study of Fifteen Business Processes in three organizations, Business Process Re-engineering and Management Journal, 2(2), pp: 8-22. 5. Kock, N.F., 2001, Changing the Focus Of Business Process Redesign from Acitivity Flows to Information Flows: A Defence Acquisition Application, Acquisition Review Quarterly, pp: 93-110. 6. Mayer, R.J., Benjamin, P.C., Caraway, B.E., Painter, M.K., 1995, A Framework and a Suite of Methods for Business Process Reengineering. in Grover, V., and Kettinger, W.J.(Eds.), Business Process Change: Concepts, Methods and Technologies, Idea Group Publishing, Harrisburg, PA, pp. 245-290. 7. Scheer, A.-W., 1999, ARIS-Business Process Modeling-3rd edition, SpringerVerlag, Berlin. 8. White, S.A., (2004), Introduction to BPMN, Available from http://www.bpmn.org/Documents/Introduction%20to%20BPMN.pdf, Accessed in June 2006. 9. Yourdan, E., (1989), Modern Structured Analysis, Prentice Hall International, Englewood Cliffs, NJ. 10. Yusuf, K.O., Smith, N.J., (1996), Modelling business processes in steel fabrication, International Journal of Project Management, 14(6), pp: 367-371.