| Overview |
| Introduction: Business Process Modelling vs. Workflow Management |
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Business process modelling (BPM) and Workflow Management (WfM) are two popular subjects in the area of information systems research (IS research, 'Wirtschaftsinformatik'). At first sight, they seem very similar: BPM and WfM foster a mainly process-oriented perspective on organisations. The process-oriented view comprises activities and their relationships within and to an organisation's context. Relationships among business processes might be specified using control flow (consecutive, parallel, or alternative execution), hierarchical decomposition and/or generic relationships. Relationships to the organisational context comprise the assignment of organisational units (company, department, role) and resources (tools, machinery).
However, the different view points taken by BPM and WfM, respectively, have lead to conceptual differences, which require thorough analysis before a mapping of both approaches can take place. They represent different levels of abstraction on process-oriented organisations. The following table displays typical differences found in the literature:
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| Business Process Modelling | Workflow Management |
- Includes manual activities/processes [FrLa03]
- "Conceptual level" of the enterprise (e.g. [Böhm00])
- Business processes can be related to every kind of resource (i.e. not only IT) [Jung01]
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- Focusses on processing of digital business/office documents [FrLa03]
- Manual processes or decision making processes are not considered [FrLa03]
- Emphasises use of information technology [Böhm00, p. 3]
- Workflows are business processes combined with IT [Sta97]
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| Overview of Contents |
Contents of this Web page describe an approach for mapping concepts of a given business process modelling language to workflow schemata. (These contents have also been published as research report No. 47.)
- We describe the mapping approach in general including modelling languages, standards and tools that were applied in this context.
- We outline conceptual foundations, equivalences, and differences of business process modelling (MEMO-OrgML) and workflow modelling (XPDL).
- In order to support mapping of business processes to workflow schemata we especially focus on information which has to be added to business processes in order to map them to workflows.
- The section on implementation issues gives further insights into the configurations of the tools that are applied in order to achieve the mapping as well as generation of software based on workflow specifications.
- The literature references used on this Web page are listed on the References- page
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View a complete example.
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