Practical process patterns: DIP

Decompose Into Patterns (DIP)

A friend of mine asked me to have a look at his first try of business process modelling in BPMN. The modelled process is well-known – “gestion de sinistres” or “claim processing”.

An apartment owner/leaseholder, who got an accident, inform the property managing company (régie), they call a repair service and validate the repair cost with the insurance company. Then the managing company control the work by the repair service and ask the insurance company about to reimburse the cost. The latter transfer the money to the former to pay the invoice.

The following picture is an attempt to model this process.

This diagram does not show the structure of the process thus not easy to understand. Actually, there are four big steps in this process:

1. Submission a claim to the managing company
2. Selection of the acceptable repair service by the managing company
3. Repair and control of repair
4. Submission the invoice from the managing company to insurance company and further payment

For all of those steps there is a proper practical process pattern to follow on.

1. Submission interface (SI) – http://www.slideshare.net/samarin/process-practical-patterns-si
2. Proposal, Action, Reaction (PAR) – see my book
3. Initial Process Skeleton (IPS) – see my book
4. Submission interface (SI) – http://www.slideshare.net/samarin/process-practical-patterns-si

So, decompose your process and try to apply practical process patterns. Maybe not exactly – slightly modified to a particular use.

Thanks,
AS

EBIZQ.NET: Should the language of #BPM be the language of business?

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In my experience, it is the best option so far. BPM (how to use processes to manage the enterprise) is good as the language of business for the following reasons:

1. BPM main “tool” -- process (an explicitly-defined coordination of activities to create a particular result) – makes the business EXPLICIT.
2. BPM makes its processes EXECUTABLE (what you model is what you run) – thus predictable (if you want).
3. Processes in BPM can be rather flexible (see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2010/12/illustrations-for-bpm-acm-case.html ).
4. BPM uses the business artefacts: events, rules, roles, data, documents, KPIs, audit trails, activities, etc. – practically everything from business architecture (see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2011/02/explaining-ea-business-architecture.html ).
5. With BPMN, BPM may express different practical patterns which are applicable in different business areas (those patterns are easier than well-known workflow patterns).
6. Proper implemented BPM can considerably speed up the evolution of the business.
7. If the business wants to share its language with the IT then BPM works well with EA, PMO, SDLC, SOA, etc.

Sure, that BPM is in favor of control-based coordination which is not sufficient in all cases. Nevertheless, BPMN allows also some event-based coordination (see http://improving-bpm-systems.blogspot.com/2011/01/explicit-event-processing-agents-in.html ).

Although BPM has no commonly-agreed-between-BPM-gurus terminology but those differences are not dramatic.

Thanks,
AS

First impression -- #SAP #NetWeaver #BPM tool

SAP NetWeaver BPM 7.2  looks (after the 4-days TZBPM training course) rather good:

• Eclipse-based design environment or "composition environment"
• Good naming conventions by default
• Business view and technical view
• Explicit definition of events in addition to several other artefacts
• One pool is one process
• Direct interpretation of BPMN without compiling it into BPEL
• A small and reasonable subset of BPMN shapes
• Three ways to implement UI (and SAP work on another one)
• Integration with the existing run-time environment (not easy to handle but doable)

Potential improvements:

1. Inter-process communication - no explicit way to say that this event is consumes by that process 
2. More comprehensive environment for human tasks (e.g. for processing of escalations without BPMN)
3. Active and non-active pools
4. Link the events to SAP PI

Thanks,
AS