Event-Driven Business Process Management and its Practical Application Taking the Example of DHL

The recently coined term «Event-Driven Business Process Management» (EDBPM) is a combination of actually two different disciplines: Business Process Management (BPM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP). The common understanding behind BPM is that each company’s unique way of doing business is captured in its business processes. For this reason, business processes are today seen as the most valuable corporate asset. In the context of this article, BPM means a software platform which provides companies the ability to model, manage, and optimize these processes for significant gain. As an independent system, Complex Event Processing (CEP) is a parallel running platform that analyses and processes events. The BPMand the CEP-platform correspond via events which are produced by the BPM-workflow engine and by the IT services which are associated with the business process steps. In this paper we present a general framework for EDBPM as well as first use cases in the context of logistics and financial services.