From Business Process Modeling to Workflow Management

Ivo Vondrák, Marcel Kružel, Petr Matoušek, Roman Szturc and Miroslav Beneš

Department of Computer Science, VSB-Technical University of Ostrava
tr. 17. listopadu 15, 708 33 Ostrava-Poruba
ivo_vondrak@vsb.cz, marcel.kruzel@vsb.cz, petr.matousek@vsb.cz, roman.szturc@vsb.cz, miroslav.benes@vsb.cz

Abstract. Business process modeling becomes more and more important mainly because of necessity to identify, specify and improve the business process. A paper is going to introduce method for business process modeling that enables not only to capture the process with its inherent property of concurrency and complexity, but also to use such model for purpose of analysis and control. It means, that structural properties of created process models are analyzed at first and then simulated to obtain quantitative characteristics like process duration, costs, etc. Later, the same model is used for a process monitoring and control. This approach enables to switch between analytic and enactment phase at instant of time and to shorten time needed for the implementation of process changes radically. We call this approach a "process model driven company", because the main goal is to achieve a company controlled and managed through its process models. The paper will show original BPM (Business Process Modeling) method, its implementation in a software system BPStudio and how this system can be extended into a workflow management system.

Keywords: Business Process, Process Modeling, Simulation and Enactment, Object-Oriented Methods, Collaborative Networks, Petri Nets, Distributed Environment, Java Technology, Intra/Internet Applications.

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