2008 International Conference on Management Science & Engineering (15th) September 10-12, 2008 Long Beach, USA

An Improved Framework of Business Process Management System Which Integrating the Strategy Management
TIAN Guo-shuangQUAN Liang
School of Economics and Management, North-east Forestry University, P.R.China, 150040 Abstract: The business process management theory is a new enterprise management method that rises in recent years. But the theory itself is not perfect yet, such as it can not support the enterprises business processs dynamically improving. The paper firstly analyzed the traditional view of business process management; and referred to its theory insufficiency. For the further use of the system, we have built another new business process management model, based on this model, the enterprises manager can improve their business process dynamically and will not interrupt the enterprises normal production activities. The new model is made up of five departments: business process workbench, business process monitor, interface, business process engine, and business process/business rule database. The new BPMS can realize the business processs dynamically improving through the creation of real case of a business process. Keywords: business process, business process management, BPMS, dynamically improve enterprises to improve their business process even with the help of developers, and it also will create additional cost for enterprises. This paper introduces an improved framework of business process management as a holistic engineered description to be used as managing and improving the enterprises business processes.

2 The traditional views of BPM

If people want to understand the traditional business process management, firstly he must have a holistic model of an organization. It views the organization from four viewpoints: the people view, the process view, the resource view and the customer view. And created this model based the four viewpoints, It is shown in fig. 1.
The people view The process view The resource view The customer view

1 Introduction
Along with quick development of modern science and technology, peoples production and life style have changed dramatically too; it forces the modern enterprises to face a more changeful and more drastic competition market. Under this kind of severe situation, every manager of forestry enterprises will have to face a serious problem: it is that how to survive and develop constantly in the future market competition. Business process management (BPM) is a new kind of management theory that appeared and developed quickly in recently years. It was established in the foundation of modern information technology, and focused the managers attention on the enterprises business process, instead of traditionally focuses on function. The theory also provide a new way to improve the Chinese enterprises management level, to help them introducing the thought of business process management into modern Chinese forestry enterprise, and improving their performance greatly. But the theory of business process management itself is not mature yet, for example, it can not support improving the enterprises business process dynamically, once the system is completed, the business process will be fixed into the system, it is very difficult for the

Fig.1 View of traditional BPM

The people view typically includes grouped components such as organization structures, culture, roles, responsibilities, accountabilities, competencies, jobs and communication. The process view includes the way we plan, control and change business processes, the resource view focuses on resources used in the organization, how they integrate into business processes, and what their respective performance and utilization levels are [1]. The customer view deals with the needs and wants of customer segments, service characteristics and design as well as customer feedback. A critical success factor for implementing and sustaining a business process management culture is the ability to understand change and its effect across all dimensions of the organization (the people, resources, processes and customers). For the organization to do so requires achieving three fundamental goals, firstly that all employees have the ability to communicate in the same business language, secondly everyone approach change from the same extended enterprise perspective, and thirdly the changing of the business process is constantly and consistently repeatable throughout the organization [2]. One of the mechanisms used by organizations to achieve this object is through business process management [1].
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Another viewpoint about BPM is based on workflow and enterprise application integration (EAI), workflow technology focus its attentions on business process automation, and the EAI mainly research how to integrate the all kinds of applications as a unabridged system. Its structure and system functions were shown in fig. 2. From the fig. 3, we can know the workflow component is the core department of the BPM framework, Enterprises application integration (EAI) integrate the different application by putting a series of methods, technology and tools together, and then realizing the integration of enterprises information systems[2].
BPM process designer Orgination index management Workflow Activities monitor management EAI Simulation analysis

Process store

Application program

2.2 The business process management lifecycle The business process management lifecycle is a closed loop, which starts with the customer and ends with the customer. To distinguish the customers needs and wants is first step, the next logical step is to define the goals which the organization want to achieve, including what capabilities have to be put in place, and what product or service needs to be offered to the customer. Following the planning phase, control is established in the lifecycle by creating standards and measurements for the designated capabilities (process, resource, and people). Resource management is the activity of tracking the performance of all operational resources, resulting in performance levels and performance deviations from standards. Supporting department of these elements is knowledge management, which feeds the learning activities of the organization and in turn enables the creation of innovation. From innovation change will be initiated, producing new solutions which feed back to the planning activity. The final loop in the cycle is performance management which takes the different organizational outputs into account in a balanced manner. Rewards and recognition from this activity directly impacts employees and the way they operate within the organization, as well as towards external customers [1].

Data flow

Information flow

Business flow

3 An improved BPMS framework

Although the traditional views have described a tantalizing image for us to manage the enterprise with the help of BPM, but they didnt provide a systemic framework, and didnt define a clear business process management tool either. For resolving this problem, we established an integrated model that is shown in fig. 3 and fig. 4.
Top managers Top managers Top managers

Enterprises' internal resource

Fig.2 Function chart of BPM based on workflow

2.1 Components of business process management To move a functionally-based organization towards a process-based organization not only require managers understanding of organizational components and the style they relate to each other, but also master the way which they should be managed. The management of a process- based organization can be subdivided into the following components, Customer Management, Planning and Control, Resource Management, Changing Process, Learning and Knowledge Management, People, and Performance Management. Many of these are familiar to functional organizations, but learning and knowledge management and changing process are new compared with formal components. To achieve the level of a process-based organization, each of the business process management components needs to achieve its goals and objectives. After all, business process management aims to align the employees of the organization to the customer, producing customer value through its business processes and associated resources. Within this, performance management and knowledge management is used as key drivers to improve value delivery to the customers of the organization.

BPMS

BPMS

BPMS

Employees Upriver enterprises

Employees

Employees Client enterprises

Fig.3 BPMS framework model

From Fig. 3 we can see that the new business process management model is made up of three levels: strategy level, business integration level and task level. The enterprises top managers manage the strategy of enterprise by the help of BPMS, and the business integration level take charge of the running of business

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process in enterprises. Finally, the task level answers for finishing the task of enterprises [3]. Enterprise realizes its business process management through its Business process management system (BPMS). BPMS is an IT system that can be used by the enterprise to carry on the modeling, deploying and managing its business process, BPMS may make the enterprise keep up with the fast innovation in the business process design aspect, simultaneously, fully use the beforehand IT investment. It can also provide one way that may cause the business process evolve to support the possible swift developing enterprises complexity cooperation in the next ten years. BPMS can integrate one four steps methodology for the business process, which are process modeling, process deploying, process managing and process dynamically improving. Four steps methodology may let different type users such as the business analyst, the enterprise managers and the staffs and so on continually participate in the business process diagnosis in the entire life cycle [4-6]. The basic interfaces of BPMS include the business analyst interfaces, the enterprise manager interfaces, and the staff/customer interfaces and with other enterprise BPMS interfaces.
BPM workstation BPM monitors

BPM connectors

Business process engine

BPM server

Knowledge database

Fig.4 Basic structure and interface of BPMS

Basic process design pattern is stored up beforehand in the BPMS knowledge library, then the process analyst can model BPMS through the graphical interfaces provided by the BPM worktable, transferring the related process patterns from the process knowledge library, and the process management tools that may be visited through using the browser, increasing (deploying) the business process from the business process knowledge library to the business process management system. The process may be deployed and renewed at the same time not needing to interrupt the process server. Tools provided to the users are the same as process server; they can dynamically inquire any condition of process example [7-10]. The process knowledge library may take charge for authorizing distribution of multi-network user's operation process based on the Internet, so that they can visit the library. The business analyst may also manage the business process through the process query language (Business Process Query Language, BPQL), with the aid of the system administration tools. BPMS must guarantee the fluidity and the ability to traversing organize boundary in all the business related activities,
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this is specially important in value chain integration and the business process outsourcing. The enterprise managers supervise the business complete situation through the BPM monitoring device, evaluating the course of business process, discovering the questions exiting in the business process promptly, and informing the business analyst, letting him analyze and improve the business process further. According to the process design and the segmentation, the process which carried by in BPMS possibly owned by the company, the services department or the Functional departments, the company headquarters possibly have the top level end-to-end process. But the district level entities may control the applicability of these processes. The different business process belonging to different enterprise is connected to other enterprise's BPMS through linkers, and all of this form the business process distributional processing system. After the business process is touched off, a business process example is built and carried out in the business process engine. The process carrying out may be monitored through the BPM monitoring device, it then feedback monitoring information to the BPM worktable [11-14], realizing continually optimization of the business process. Using the BPM monitoring device, we may directionally, real-time monitor the operation of business process, discover the latent questions, optimize the business process continually, circulating as this until achieve the most superior business process processing and the operation pattern, brings bigger benefit for the enterprise. In enterprise knowledge library of BPMS is responsible for the organization study and storage, let the enterprise managers and staff register, inquiry and renew. If the enterprise use BPMS to define and the integrate process, it is very easy to integrate extant system into process design. What although BPMS most frequent is used to integrate the extant background system, but it also has other potential. For instance, many companies have prepared to use the tools such as simulation as well as other commercial intelligence now (Business Intelligent, BI). If simulation once is integrated in BPMS, only needing simple operation such as drag and drop on the tabletop of the designed process, the user can participate in any process design conveniently. The user may also let the simulating process exchange information with other participant's process, then the simulator turns an agent in the BPMS system. It can increase intelligence for the system and foresee the entire process circulation .e.g. simulated market is responds new product delivery). Integrating a simulator with this method may provide the simulation service for each process participants [15-18]. Regarding different company and the different business process, the extent involving IT in process design will be much different. This is decided by the enterprise culture, technical ability, as well as needs the process type that deployed [19]. On business aspect it mainly pays attention on How to discover the process, design the process and analysis the optimization of

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process. In summary, characteristic of the BPMS is: standardization. the formidable cross platform, the technical sophistication, the high usability, the extendibility support and so on ,and each aspect has the superiority; ) uses the technical support software that be able to cover all the demands of all levels of the EAI; in the process management aspect, it has provided all complete set of products covering all the complete period of business process development, including business modeling, application connection, process monitoring and management, business diagnosis and optimization and so on [20-21].

their enterprise information and knowledge in a data repository. Process Modeling methods provide users with an efficient way to create a model and analyze their business processes. Simulation enables organizations to observe how a process will perform in response to variations of inputs to the process, just as in a real-life work environment. The business analysis and process translation function are built on three upper functions. 4.2 UML modeler UML Modeler is an object modeling tool used as a stand-alone application, or running as a conjunction with the Business Modeler, that facilitates building business-process-driven applications by bridging the gap between business requirements and their corresponding IT requirements. Standard UML diagrams are developed from a process models business objects, rules and enterprise data structures created with the Business Modeler [22]. 4.3 BPM Server The BPM Server provides the ability to view, share, and check-in and checkout process models (and related information) from anywhere in the world. BPM Server consists of the two components, shown in Fig. 7.

4 Components of BPM system

The internal structure of BPMS can be divided into three hierarchies: integration, automation, cooperation. An improved BPMSs structure is show in fig. 5:
Business rule database BPM workbench Business rule database Web publisher Business process engine

BPM knowledge database

Web publisher

Business status display

Fig.7 BPM server component

Fig.5 Internal framework of BPMS

4.1 BPM workbench BPM Workbench is a process-modeling tool providing analysis, animated simulations, detailed reporting, design of user interfaces, improved the process and business process integration. BPM Workbench consists of the four components shown in Fig. 6:

Business modeler Enterprise modeling Process modeling Simulation Business analysis Process translation BPM workbench

XML maping

BPML modeler

The BPM knowledge database is a content management solution that cleans up, consolidates, and provides centralized storage of business process models, enterprise data, relational knowledge, and other corporate information. The BPM Server Web Publisher is the Internet-based delivery method enabling team members and other staffers to view, get their tasks and use process models, enterprise data and other corporate information contained in the BPM knowledge database. Based on individually defined user access levels, team members at numerous locations are able to log in and access the published materials through the Internet or corporate intranet. In addition to communicating process models and associated data, Web Publisher also informs, educates and trains personnel in the following areas. 4.4 BPM monitor The BPM Monitor provides actual, real-time data from events produced by Business process engine. Based on up-to-the-minute information, managers make business decisions on engaged resources and activities being performed. BPM Monitor completes the Continual Process Improvement life cycle by feeding actual metrics back into BPM Workbench for further analysis and process redesign. BPM Monitor consists of two components, shown in Fig. 8.
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Xform designer

Fig.6 BPM workbench components

There are four components in the BPM work-bench, the business modeler includes four functions: enterprise Modeling makes it possible for organizations to capture

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Business process status display

Business status display

Fig.8 The BPM monitor component

Business Process Status Display monitors the data and audit trail of Business process engine to provide process managers a detailed operational console of the automated business process as it functions. Workflow Monitor is a Web-based Java application, allowing process managers to view their automated business processes and then perform any administrative action (suspending, stopping, reassigning, etc.) of in-flight work items from an Internet connection anywhere in the world. Specifically, process managers are empowered to track and determine performance levels of employees, organization units, or entire processes and perform load balancing, as necessary [22]. Business Status Display provides a higher-level, more strategic view of the automated business process than the Workflow Dashboard. The Business Dashboard is designed as a decision-making tool for senior management, allowing tactical problem-solving on the fly. While the Workflow Dashboard provides intricate details on the automated business process, Business Dashboard provides business statistics reporting by comparing comprehensive, actual metrics to established performance measures. Additionally, the Business Dashboard locates and measures the cost of work items that match particular criteria. Archived historical business metrics play a valuable role in proactive decision-making in real time. Actual metrics and statistical information is easily fed back into BPM Workbench for further analysis and process, completing the cycle of Continuous Process Improvement.

adjusted their development strategy and focus more attention on green food production rather than wood processing, this change required the forestry bureau to rebuild some business process to meet the demand of new development strategy. But soon the managers found that it is very difficult to change their business processes, because the processes have be integrated in the system as a part of code. They have to ask for the famous information companys help, and redesigned their system. The additional demand increases cost greatly, and take a rather long time to finish the job. The original process management system is shown in fig. 9:
Quote Fixed process rule model Quote Business function

Fixed process model

Work tasks

Work flow engine

Process Database

Process monitor

Process control

Fig.9 The Original Process Management System

Based the original process management, we designed a new business process management system for Suiyang forestry bureau, it is shown in fig. 10:
Strategy management Top managers Quote
Business process model Business function

5 Empirical research
Suiyang forestry bureau is a large forestry enterprise, and it locates in Heilongjiang province. Its area is 516000 hectares, the width from west to east is 50 km. and the length form north to south is 150 km. There are over one hundred forest management areas, wood processing factories, and other forestry product processing factories belong to Suiyang forestry bureau. All management activities and production process have to be applied in a so large geography areas, the traditional management style can not meet the needing of a modern large forestry enterprise. In 2003, in order to improve their management ability, they built a business process management system for themselves with the help of a famous information company, and realized management process automation. But, after the system running for a year, the managers found that there are still many problems accompanying with the new system, and this problems have greatly prevented them to improve their management level in further. For example, in 2004, Suiyang forestry bureau
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Quote Organization model

Quote Integrated defining interface Business rule database

Business process engine

Process Database

Employees Work tasks

Process monitor

Process management

Fig.10 Improved Business Process Management System

In the new system, we put the process model,

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organization model and business rule into three separate databases, and use an integrated defining interface to manage and redesign the business process, business rules and organization models. The business processes are running in business process engine as a real case, when we change the business process model and their rules, the running business real case will keep its original status, and realized the dynamical improvement of business processes. The new system is also more efficiency than the old system, because the old system does not support the business improvement, and the enterprise has to run its business process under a unreasonable status, this not only increase the management cost of enterprise, but also decrease the efficiency of the business process. The new system resolved the problems successfully, it allows enterprises change their business processes on any time. After the new system is applied in Suiyang forestry bureau, we compared the key parameters of business processes which running in new system with the old one, the data is shown in tab. 1:
Tab.1 Contrast of main business process parameters Parameters Old system New system Max process time 3.7 days 2.8 days Min process time 5 minutes 5 minutes Average process time 1.7days 1.2 days Max process cost 3125 yuan 2136 yuan Min process cost 135 yuan 47 yuan Average process cost 577 yuan 321 yuan Process changing cost 5000 yuan 112 yuan

From the tab. 1, we can learn that the improved business process management system have enhanced the business process performance greatly, and reduced the change cost also. Compared with old business process management system, the new one has three features: firstly, the new system cost less than old one; secondly, the new system is more efficiency than the old one; thirdly, the new system is more flexible than the old system, particularly when the managers want to change their business processes.

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