Overview
Topic status: We're looking for students to study this topic.
Business Process Management (BPM) has recently gained prominence and is now a widely used approach to streamline organisational performance. BPM is also increasingly a popular stage as part of larger systems implementations projects. As one of its methodological core components, BPM requires business process modelling. Business process modelling is an approach for codifying, depicting, analysing and improving how businesses conduct their operations. Process models are essentially describing control flows, i.e. the way an organization operates. It is widely used to deconstruct organizational complexity and to extract business processes as an emerging unit of analysis. The term 'Business Process Modeling' encompasses all graphical representations of business processes and related elements such as data, resources, etc., as employed for diverse purposes including process documentation, process improvement, compliance, software implementation, or quality certification, among others.
With the popularity of upcoming standards such as Business Process Modelling Notation (BPMN) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL), there is now a rapidly growing interest in allowing business analysts to model business processes that could be turned into executable programs. Having an executable process model also makes it possible for business modellers to use a wide variety of design time and run time analysis techniques such as deadlock analysis, log analysis and simulation studies, to support process improvement recommendations. However, there are perceived gaps between process design and process execution. Addressing this gap is a key motivation of this proposed this study.
In this project, a detailed case study approach is used to study and demonstrate how to conduct an end-to-end process modelling exercise. That is, how to capture the generic business requirements, identify and implement possible process improvements and design executable business processes. Real life data and processes from a reputed Queensland based company will be used as the base of the case study and YAWL (Yet Another Workflow Language) will be used to design the executable processes.
YAWL builds on the insights gained from the workflow patterns research and combines it with the powerful language of Petri-nets. YAWL is an original and sophisticated workflow language developed at QUT??s BPM research group in collaboration with Eindhoven University of Technology www.yawlfoundation.org. YAWL provides a very powerful, yet fundamentally simple language for process modellers to describe complex control flow relations between business processes, consequently, enabling businesses to own and manage very flexible and dynamic business processes.
This project entails two phases. Phase 1; will involve the derivation of detailed business process models which will capture the current process details and analyse potential process improvements. Phase 2; entails the designing of the business process as an executable YAWL model. This phase will also verify the correctness of the model using various design time and runtime analyses.
Required skill set
- A good understanding of Business Process Management issues
- The ability (or a willingness to learn how) to design business process models
- Programming skills in Java.
- Study level
- Honours
- Supervisors
- QUT
- Organisational unit
Science and Engineering Faculty
- Research area
- Contact
- Please contact the supervisor.
Dr Moe Wynn
Professor Arthur ter Hofstede
