Today's organizations are increasingly pushed to be distributed by space, time and capabilities and are involved to leverage synergies by integrating their business processes in order to produce new value-added products and services. Here the importance of integrating whole processes rather than simply integrate databases or software applications. Seeing the duality between products and processes, we propose to exploit flexibility provided by the product-line engineering approach for modeling business processes as a Business Process Line (BPL) in order to capture process variability, promote reuse and integration and provide the capacity to anticipate process changes. To support process evolution and consistency, we suggest the use of decision tables to elicit, track and manage all the emerging decision points during business process modeling, with the purpose of maintaining the relationships among business needs, environmental changes and process tasks. In a real case study we practiced the proposed methodology by leveraging the synergy of feature models, variability mechanisms and decision tables. The results prove that the BPL satisfies the requirements for business process flexibility.
Driving Flexibility and Consistency of Business Processes by Means of Product-Line Engineering and Decision Tables
BOFFOLI, NICOLA;CAIVANO, DANILO;VISAGGIO, Giuseppe
2012-01-01
Abstract
Today's organizations are increasingly pushed to be distributed by space, time and capabilities and are involved to leverage synergies by integrating their business processes in order to produce new value-added products and services. Here the importance of integrating whole processes rather than simply integrate databases or software applications. Seeing the duality between products and processes, we propose to exploit flexibility provided by the product-line engineering approach for modeling business processes as a Business Process Line (BPL) in order to capture process variability, promote reuse and integration and provide the capacity to anticipate process changes. To support process evolution and consistency, we suggest the use of decision tables to elicit, track and manage all the emerging decision points during business process modeling, with the purpose of maintaining the relationships among business needs, environmental changes and process tasks. In a real case study we practiced the proposed methodology by leveraging the synergy of feature models, variability mechanisms and decision tables. The results prove that the BPL satisfies the requirements for business process flexibility.I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
