How to Automate Business Processes

In the course of operational process modeling, all of the activities involved in a business process will be presented from a business management perspective (1), meaning that the model will focus on the business management information needed by the target groups. These groups are generally specialist departments who will be using the results to design an organizational work domain. At this level, along with the processes themselves, a definition of the business objects involved is included (2). It is important to note that at this stage in the modeling, this is still a purely functional definition, and is not related to IT. When operating with BIC in this phase, the EPC and BPMN models are used to define dynamic content, while static content is defined by the structure diagram.

The operational process modeling that has now been generated is generally not suitable for immediate implementation. Rather, experience gained over the course of many projects has shown that implementation will succeed only if IT process modeling is undertaken as an intermediary step. Here, it is important to ensure that there be absolutely no semantic smearing of operational and IT-specific content within one individual model. This would sharply restrict the usefulness of the models in both areas of application. For this reason, a loose coupling between the operational (1) and the IT-specific process modeling (3) is recommended. This separation should also be maintained for the static content. This means that business objects that have been defined from an operational perspective (2), such as a customer order, will, in this step, be refined to an IT object (4). In this same step, IT-supported activities will be linked to support services (5).

The technological solution will be drafted during the IT design phase. In this phase, appropriate automation models (6), data definitions (7), and the associated IT services will be designed, based on the IT process and object models (3 and 4). For representing the content mentioned above, BIC Platform includes, along with BPMN, ArchiMate notation. This allows the definition of still more complex interrelationships within a target system’s IT architecture.

Following operational modeling, IT-specific modeling, and the resulting IT design, implementation of the future solution can take place, meaning that the executable processes (9), the data definitions (10), and the IT services will be finalized. For this, BIC Process Execution provides a comprehensive development platform that, on the basis of technical BPMN diagrams, implements solutions all the way through to successful running of the application.