Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) is a management science that focuses on improving corporate performance by managing and optimising a company's business processes. It can therefore be described as a "process optimization process." It is argued that BPM enables organizations to be more efficient, more effective and more capable of change than a functionally focused, traditional hierarchical management approach. These processes can impact the cost and revenue generation of an organization.

As a managerial approach, BPM sees processes as strategic assets of an organization that must be understood, managed, and improved to deliver value-added products and services to clients.[3] This approach closely resembles other Total Quality Management or Continuous Improvement Process methodologies and BPM proponents also claim that this approach can be supported, or enabled, through technology.[4] As such, many BPM articles and pundits frequently discuss BPM from one of two viewpoints: people and/or technology.

Changes in Business Process Management

The concept of business process may be as traditional as concepts of tasks, department, production, and outputs, arising from job shop scheduling problems in the early 20th Century. The management and improvement approach as of 2010, with formal definitions and technical modeling, has been around since the early 1990s (see business process modeling). Note that the term "business process" is sometimes used by IT practitioners as synonymous with the management of middleware processes or with integrating application software tasks.

Although BPM initially focused on the automation of business processes with the use of information technology, it has since been extended to integrate human-driven processes in which human interaction takes place in series or parallel with the use of technology. For example, workflow management systems can assign individual steps requiring deploying human intuition or judgment to relevant humans and other tasks in a workflow to a relevant automated system.

Windows Workflow Foundation

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) is a Microsoft technology that provides an API, an in-process workflow engine, and a rehostable designer to implement long-running processes as workflows within .NET applications. The current version of WF was released as part of the .NET Framework version 4 and 4.5 and is referred to as (WF4).

Activities in WF

A workflow, as defined here, is a series of distinct programming steps or phases. Each step is modeled in WF as an Activity. The .NET Framework provides a library of activities (such as WriteLine, an activity that writes text to the console or other form of output). Custom activities can also be developed for additional functionality. Activities can be assembled visually into workflows using the Workflow Designer, a design surface that runs within Visual Studio. The designer can also be hosted in other applications.

Encapsulating programming functionality into the activities allows the developer to create more manageable applications; each component of execution can be developed as a Common Language Runtime object whose execution will be managed by the workflow runtime.

Workflow Usage Scenarios

Windows Workflow Foundation is used to create applications that execute an ordered business process, such as the steps needed to approve a document, hire a candidate for a position, or make a purchase. These processes can execute in a short amount of time, but are typically long-running, in which the application will need to shut down to conserve memory between steps. Typically, business processes to be modeled as workflows have the following features:

• Have specific business logic that may need to change periodically, such as the tax or shipping calculation needed to determine the purchase price of an item, or the series of steps needed to approve a purchase, hire, or process.
• Have several inputs into the workflow that may come hours or days apart
• Have advanced business logic that might require workflow execution to travel down different branches depending on different circumstances.
• Need to interact with other systems, such as a database, website or other client application, or web service.

Authoring Workflows

Workflows are created either by being defined in XAML Extensible Application Markup Language using the workflow designer, or by being assembled programmatically in a .NET language such as C# or VB.NET. If the designer is used, activities are assembled on the workflow designer canvas by dragging them from the toolbox. Workflow arguments and variables are also created and assigned within the designer. If a workflow is assembled in code, activities are instantiated like other CLR objects, and assembled into collections of a single parent activity, usually a Sequence or Flowchart. The single parent activity is then executed using WorkflowApplication or WorkflowInvoker, and runs as a workflow. The term "Workflow" here usually refers to the root activity that is executed by the host. Workflows can use both out-of-box activities and custom activities. Out-of-box activities include flow control activities such as DoWhile, Flowchart-related activities such as FlowDecision, WCF Messaging activities such as Send, and primitive activities that perform simple tasks like Assign and WriteLine. Custom activities are user-created CLR objects that derive from the class System.Activities.Activity, and provide declarative functionality by allowing the developer to define the execution behavior of the activity in code. Custom activities can benefit from having a custom activity designer associated with them to enhance the visual authoring experience in the Visual Studio IDE.

Business Process Reporting

Business processes must include up-to-date and accurate reports to ensure effective action. An example of this is the availability of purchase order status reports for supplier delivery follow-up as described in the section on effectiveness above. There are numerous examples of this in every possible business process.

Another example from production is the process of analysis of line rejections occurring on the shop floor. This process should include systematic periodical analysis of rejections by reason, and present the results in a suitable information report that pinpoints the major reasons, and trends in these reasons, for management to take corrective actions to control rejections and keep them within acceptable limits. Such a process of analysis and summarisation of line rejection events is clearly superior to a process which merely inquires into each individual rejection as it occurs.

BPM and SOA

SOA can exist without BPM, and BPM has flourished without a firm understanding of SOA. The combination of SOA and BPM is more powerful than either is alone.

SOA provides the ability to create process independence. SOA, loosely coupled with BPM, automatically creates services that can be reused in many ways across an, enterprise, and in multiple processes that can be continuously improved.

BPM Designer for Business

Designer rehosting is a common scenario that refers to hosting the workflow design canvas inside of a custom application. The hosting application most people are familiar with is Visual Studio, however there are a number of scenarios where showing the workflow designer in an application may be useful:

• Monitoring applications (allowing an end user to visualize the process, as well as runtime data about the process such as the currently active state, aggregate execution time data, or other information about an instance of the workflow).
• Applications that allow a user to customize the process with a limited set of activities.