Business Process Management (BPM) was influenced by concepts and technologies from business administration and computer science. BPM had its root in process-oriented trends and was treated as a management philosophy since mid 1990s (James F. Chang, 2006; Mathias Weske, 2007). Studies investigating BPM had been carried out several management principles and practices were associated. Most of these concepts were identical to Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Total Quality Management (TQM) concepts.
In the book Business Process Management: Concepts, Languages, Architectures, Mathias Weske had quoted from Davenport, who defined business process as:
“a set of logically related tasks performed to achieve a defined business outcome for a particular customer or market.”
And
“a specific ordering of work activities across time and place, with a beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs.”
However, Mathias Weske (2007) had adopted definition as:
“A business process consists of a set of activities that are performed in coordination in an organizational and technical environment.”
These activities come together to make a business goal became achievable. Every single business process is performed by a single company, but it may interact with business processes performed by other companies.”
From the business process definition, Mathias Weske (2007) had defined the concept of BPM as:
“Business process management includes concepts, methods, and techniques to support the design, administration, configuration, enactment, and analysis of business processes.”
The basis of BPM had explicit representation of business process with their activities and execution constraints between them. When BPM defined, people could analysis, improvement and enactment with BPM. In traditionally, business process had manually executed as usual by knowledge personnel, regulations of company, and installed procedures. Nowadays, company had more additional benefits by apply Information Technology like Business Process Management System (BPMS) when coordinating activities involved by business process.
According to definition of James F. Chang (2006), BPMS is
“a new class of software that allows organizations to devise process-centric information technology solutions. Process-centric means BPMS solutions are able to integrate people, systems, and data”.
BPM fills the gap between the wide-open, unstructured world of collaboration and the precise transaction processing of enterprise applications. It has become widely realized that important enterprise processes routinely cross the boundaries of enterprise applications. Processes like order-to-cash or procure-to-pay may involve several enterprise applications such as taking orders in CRM, ERP creating invoices and purchase orders, and managing production and fulfilment in SCM.
BPM, especially in combination with services that can move data in and out of enterprise applications and other information sources provide a way to clear define, manage, and automate processes that span enterprise applications. BPM also allows processes that bring in people and systems from outside the company to the defined process. In this way, BPM supports processes that take place across an extended business network.
The personalities of processes currently automated by BPM are as follows:
When evaluating and adopting BPM technology, two standards are referenced over and over: BPMN and BPEL. To fully understand what BPM technology does, it is important to understand the role of these and other standards, which provide a common infrastructure for process modeling and automation.
Business process modelling is the art of describing how work is done in a company at the appropriate level to achieve the desired communication. The typical goals of business process modelling are to capture a process so that it can be better understood and improved or to describe a process in detail and associate it with technology so that it can be automated.
A business process model in general is simply a description of a business process. Visual business models are description of the steps that take place during a process and frequently represent in flowcharts such as the one shown in Figure 3, although other forms of models such as numerical equations or systematic procedures are also sometimes used.
Here is a list of the most common components and management mechanisms that are involved in application assembly.
These main functions would provide the basis for evaluation of BPMS platforms.
From the main functions of BPMS, the author has evaluated four platforms to support the implementation stage. These four platforms were Drools 5, jBPM 4.3, OSWorkflow 2.8, and ARIS. The critical evaluation framework has been discussed in the main functions of BPMS within this chapter. The evaluation framework included:
The marking guidance has included at appendices. The guidance provided descriptions for each mark from 0 to 10.The investigation of BPMS has marked these platforms base on the evaluation framework and marking guidance then ploted to charts.
Drools was a open-source business rule management system (BRMS) with a forward chaining inference based rules engine, more correctly known as a production rule system, using an enhanced implementation of the Rete algorithm. Adapting Rete to an object-oriented interface allows for more natural expression of business rules with regards to business objects. Drools is written in Java, but able to run on Java and .NET. Drools has been supported by JBoss since 2005 and renamed to “JBoss Rules”.
Drools 5 have been released on May 2009. The main goals of this release were introducing Complex Event Processing (CEP) engine (in Fusion module) and workflow capabilities (in Flow module). On the release of Drools 5, it has changed name from Business Rule Management System (BRMS) to Business Logic integration Platform (BLiP) with modules:
The platforms had Drools Expert; it was an excellent rule engine, developed as the first-class module in mind. The platform received ten marks for business rule function because it had long time development and matured enough for production environment.
Drools Guvnor combined with Drools plug-in on Eclipse were outstanding at BRMS and editor. The combination help user easily draw; manage models on both Web and desktop IDE (integrated develop environment). It helped the platform received eight marks for modelling tools, nine marks for model repository, and eight marks for centralized task management.
The documentation of platform did not have any mention about web service on whole platform. That meant the platform did not support web service either BPEL standard.
According to the official user guide at Drools website, the integration ability with OpenBravo ERP and OSWorkflow were still under developing at time this report conducted. The platform received one mark for integration function.
jBPM is a platform for executable process languages ranging from business process management (BPM) over workflow to service orchestration. jBPM supports three different process languages. Each one is targeted towards a specific function and environment.
jBPM builds all these process languages natively on top of a single technology: the Process Virtual Machine (PVM). Even as the BPM industry converges towards new standards, the investment in jBPM is protected; the PVM foundation will remain stable.
The supporting of BPEL has gave jBPM a good marks (eight) at web service function. Support BPEL has also meant this platform good in integration with legacy systems.
The ability of generate form for human interaction workflow was the good function that included in jBPM. This ability contributed seven marks for user interface widget function.
Modelling, repositories, and centralized task management were the advantages of jBPM. This platform developed some plug-in for Eclipse to create the Graphical Process Designer. This approach gave the power of Eclipse to business process on both graphical modelling and debugging.
The investigation shown the weakness of jBPM was the lacking of simulation tools. Simulation tools helped process designer in bottle-neck solving. The simulation function of jBPM was under developing at time of this report conducted.
OSWorkflow is a mature open-source Java workflow engine. It is mainly aimed at the programmer and not an end user or business analyst. For the end user or business analyst, it includes a user-friendly visual workflow modeller designed only for basic usage.
The strength of OSWorkflow showed at modelling tools and
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