A Business Process Modelling Environment for Describing Dynamic Processes

In order to survive in the competitive business environment introduced by the technological burst of the last decade, most organisations automated their business activities. The efficient automation of business activities leads to improving their performance and enabling enterprise-wide monitoring and coordination. Business process (BP) modelling is an effective tool towards analysing the behaviour of business activities and facilitating their accurate and complete representation in an information system. Four types of business processes are usually studied in the literature: production, administrative, ad-hoc and collaborative. Administrative and production BPs refer to bureaucratic procedures that include well-defined steps and can be easily described by conventional modelling tools. Ad-hoc and collaborative processes deal with unique or loosely defined conditions and are dynamic in nature. Thus, they are not easily modelled. In this paper, we present a BP modelling environment for efficiently describing dynamic processes. BP modelling is based on extensions of the Modified Petri-Net (MPN) model and enables the description of activities in multiple levels of abstraction. The environment build to support BP modelling is based upon Lotus Domino/Notes groupware product. In order to depict MPN functionality, the experience obtained from its deployment for modelling dynamic banking activities is also presented.