Experiences and comparison study of EPC & UMLfor Business Process & IS modeling
Md. Rashedul Islam
School of Business andInformaticsHögskolan i BoråsBorås, Swedenrashed.cse@gmail.com
Md. Rofiqul Islam
School of Business andInformaticsHögskolan i BoråsBorås, Swedenrana_aiub01@yahoo.com
Md. Shariful Alam
School of Business andInformaticsHögskolan i BoråsBorås, Swedenshajib004@yahoo.com
Md. Shafiul Azam
Dept. of Computer Scienceand EngineeringScience and TechnologyUniversity, PabnaPabna, Bangladeshshahincseru@gmail.com
Abstract
—
Business process modeling is an approach by which wecan analyze and integrate the business process. Using theBusiness Process Modeling we can represent the current andfuture process of a business/organization/enterprise. The businessprocess modeling is a prerequisite and essential implementing abusiness or making any automation system. In this paper, wepresent our experience in a Business Process Modeling fororganization. This paper presents detailed description aboutbusiness process modeling, details description about the main twomodeling language EPC and UML. This paper presented theuses, advantages, disadvantages of EPC and UML modelinglanguage. Here we tried to express the experience about thosemodeling language. This paper presents a details comparisonbetween two modeling language from the business processmodeling and information system implementation point of view.Keywords- Business Process Modeling, Petri net, Event-drivenProcess Chain (EPC), Unified Modeling Language (UML),Process-oriented modeling, Object-oriented modeling.
I.
I
NTRODUCTION
Business Process Modeling and successful developmentand implementation of business interrelated. Before thinking aBusiness information system or Information system supportingbusiness process then the first comes to you the businessprocess modeling. A business process modeling demonstratesthe whole scenario of business to the all related people and alsoincreases the performance of business process.Every business or organization consists of high number of interlinked core processes and every core process has many subprocess and so many interrelated internal and external objects.So modeling this business is very imported for implementing asuccessful business and IT implementation.There are many modeling approach has been developed fordefine a model of a business respect to organizational andinformation system aspect. Different business process flows aredifferent way and different types of people are involves inthose business process. So different business process modelingis relatively good for different business process and differentlevel of people. The Process oriented modeling is mainlydescribes the business process from the business perspectiveand it is so much understandable for business people.On the other hand object oriented modeling is closelyrelated to implementation. Now a day both two types arecoming closer together for making efficient businessinformation process modeling which is best for process thebusiness also implementing the business information system.In this paper we have discussed the comparison of twomain business process modeling language one is EPC andanother is UML. The EPC is mainly the process orientedmodeling and the UML is mainly the objecting orientedmodeling. The EPC and UML have enough tools to representany business process. Also those are very useful and easy tounderstand to related people. After all every modeling languagehas some advantage and disadvantage or difficulties. At thetime of comparing of two modeling language we have foundsome difficulties related to each other. Some are good andunderstandable for some level of people and other for otherlevel of people.II.
BUSINESS
PROCESS
MODELINGBusiness Process Modeling (BPM) also we cancall Business Process Discovery (BPD). Business processmodeling is an approach by which we can analyze andintegrate the business process. Using the Business ProcessModeling we can represent the current and future process of abusiness/organization/enterprise. Business Process Modelingfigures out the whole business model and provides maximumbusiness performance. The main outcomes of the BusinessProcess Modeling are, add value for the customer and reducethe costs for the company to increase profit.A Business Process Model is commonly a diagramrepresenting a sequence of activities and information flow. Itrepresents the business in sequence start to end by events,actions and links or connection points. Business Process Modelincludes both IT processes and people processes. There are twomain types of Business Process Model:1.
Baseline Model (Present)2.
To Be Model (Future)
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(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,Vol. 9, No. 3, March 2011125 http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/ISSN 1947-5500
A.
Some common issues with business process modeling [1]
Managing collaborative activities within businessprocess models that are derived from the
“transformational” approach
Canonical models and variability managementNotations are stabilizing but methods are laggingProcess decomposition
o
Some rules available, methodologydependent
o
Becomes more important when coupled withBusiness process execution and WebServicesManaging requirements from business processes, touse cases to systems
o
Is the use case driven approach still needed?(non question)IT enablement focus
–
Human InteractionManagement tends to be relegated to forms drivenapproaches
B.
There are so many type of advantage of business processmodeling. We can describe the advantage of business processmodeling in different aspect as follows:
a)
Formalize existing process and spot needed improvements
Using the Business Process Modeling analyst can make anoverall structure of whole business in a graphical view. BPMhelps to represent all processes and data source internal andexternal objects which is understandable for any businesspeople. Also BMP help to make the business model which willbe adjustable for the future need.
b)
Facilitate automated, efficient process flow
BPM supports process parallelism. In business has differentparallel activity which can perform independently. Using BPMwe can model parallel activity. And it is possible to make anefficient process flow
c)
Increase
productivity and decrease head count
In a Business a suitable model can increase productivityand appropriate resource allocation reduce the cost. UsingBusiness Process Model we can design the suitable processmodel with resource allocation which is helpful to increase theproductivity and decrease no of uses people.
C.
Business Process Modeling Language
There are mainly 4 Business Process Modeling Approaches
a)
Petri net
Petri net is amathematicalmodeling languagefor the
description of distributed systems.Mainly Petri net isone kind of directedbipartite graph.In the Petri Netgraph all transactions and places represented by node.
b)
Event-driven Process Chain (EPC)
An Event-driven Process Chain (EPC) ismainlyflowcharttype modeling language. The EPCis very useful forbusiness process modeling.Also itis easy to understand for business people.
c)
Unified Modeling Language (UML)
Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a general-purpose and Object Oriented Modeling Language.Using UML we can create visual model for makingIT system using graphic notation techniques.
d)
Dynamic Essential Modeling (DEMO)
Dynamic Essential Modeling (DEMO) is mainlycommunication-centered organizational modelingapproach. DEMO is helpful for details specificationof behavior of participating actors.In this paper we describe the details and comparison of
Event-driven Process Chain (EPC)
and
Unified ModelingLanguage (UML).
III.
REFLECTION
ON
EPC
MODELING
LANGUAGE
Event-driven Process Chains (EPC)
is a widely usedapproach for Modeling Business Process. The EPC providescomprehensive means for modeling several aspects of abusiness process [7]. The modeling approach
Event-drivenProcess Chains (EPC)
[2, 3] has been developed for modelbusiness process within the
ARIS
framework.In whole business process there are so many businessfunction event activity. Using the
EPC model
, we can modelwhole business process with different events and businessfunction in sequences of events triggering business functions.The business functions are themselves the results of otherfunctions separately from initial events triggering the wholeprocess. Representing business process decisions andexpanding the complex control flow, EPC control structure
with connector operation “and”, “or” and “xor” can be used.
This set of elements describes the processes, since someauthors define a process as a succession of events and functions[10, 11]. The connector may be used for split or join and beforeand after of those connector will be event or function. The threeconnectors have twelve possibilities. In several standardsoftware package (SAP) have used the EPC for makingsoftware for documenting the business process [4].
A.
ARIS
–
ARchitecture of Integrated Information Systems
ARIS (Scheer 2000) [5] stands for Architecture of Integrated Information Systems, and denotes a methodologyfor modeling business processes. EPCs are not a new method inessence, as it contains elements of the Petri nets and GERT(Scheer 2002) [6]. The ARIS methodology or its coretechnique EPCs, have been often confused with the softwaretools such as ARIS Toolset (IDS Scheer 2003) [7]. Just to
make one example, ARIS is labeled as a „modeling tool‟ in
Vernadat (2002) [8]. This confusion is probably augmented bythe success of IDS Scheer, and it is considered to be a leader inthe BPM sector (Gartner Group 2002) [9].
(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,Vol. 9, No. 3, March 2011126 http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/ISSN 1947-5500
The Event-driven Process Chains (EPC) diagram is the coretechnique for modeling in ARIS. The ARIS divided a processin different aspects or views. The several views are (a) thefunctional view, (b) the data view, or (c) the resource view. TheEPC technique for modeling in ARIS makes link the all viewsin control view. We will describe the different views infollowing paragraph.
a)
Descriptive Views
In previous paragraph we have mentioned the differentviews. and above, the concept of ARIS lies on reducingcomplexity into different views. In the following example,Figure-1 Business Process Model with different views [11]describes the excerpt model of a business process with theconcept of different views and link between views. Thefollowing example is a computer supported business processfor processing customer orders. This business process includesdifferent processes, activity/function, events, users,Organizational units and IT resources, Also relationshipbetween component for describe the whole business flow.
Figure 1: Business Process Model with different views
In the above diagram the whole model and components hasbeen divided into individual views for reducing the complexityof the business model. The all components are divided inindividual views on the basis of relationship of component andaction. The criteria of separation is that, the relationshipsbetween components in the same view are relatively strong andrelationships between components of different views arerelatively weak. The four views of this modeling resultaccording to ARIS are describes bellow:
b)
Data view:
The data view generally contains the events and statuses.Events mainly the informational object which is represents thedata. Here the events a
re “customer order received”, “order confirmation prepared”. On the other hand Statuses are“customer status” and “article status” also represented by data.
In data view the description of detail requirements plays animportant role for developing Information System.
c)
Function view:
The function view mentions the performing activity of abusiness process. Also the overall relationship and relationshipbetween function. Sometime the function is complex. Forreducing the complexity it can be broken down. In above
diagram “Order confirmation”, “Order Tracking”, and“Production Planning” are the components of Function View.
d)
Organization view:
The Organizational view contains the relationship betweenusers and organizational units. The Organizational units formedby some user for performing some specific task. Human beingsare able to perform complex social action such as enterprise.But the complex action can be broken in manageable units. Inthe above diagram the content of Organizational views are
“department” and “user”.
e)
Resource view:
The Resource view constitutes by resource of organizationlike Information technology components like Computer, DataServer.
f)
The Control View: EPC
The Control view mainly the combine view of all views.Initially all views are developed separately for reducing thecomplexity. But in Control view links functions, organizationalunits and data in together. Here functions, events, informationresources, and organization units are connected together into acommon context according to process flow. And this combineControl view model is the complete EPC. Extended form of EPC we can link additional elements such as Organizationalunit, data, product or service to the functions in an EPCDiagram.
B.
Purpose of EPC
Before thinking about Purpose of EPC, if we think aboutthe purpose of Business Modeling we can see that identifyingthe all core and sub processes and make a suitable model andway of business process is the main purposes of BusinessModeling. So Making a Business Model is the main purpose of EPC Modeling Language. Also there are some other mainpurposes like:Develop business process model which is useful forrepresenting an outline of whole business.Make a graphical method modeling which will beeasy understandable to the users.Gathering requirements in the beginning phase.Capture the flow of events in the business domain.Describe in detail organizational aspects of thebusiness information systems. Make starting point foridentifying the actors of the system.Distinguish between function and processIdentify software elements by analyzing businessareas which related to business data and functions.To make the whole organization more productivityand maximize resource utilization
C.
Advantage of EPC
As mentioned before, the EPC is widely used modelinglanguage which has so many features by which we canrepresent any business model easily. Also it has manyadvantages. After a thorough evaluation of a number of methodologies, techniques, and tools, EPC has been selected
(IJCSIS) International Journal of Computer Science and Information Security,Vol. 9, No. 3, March 2011127 http://sites.google.com/site/ijcsis/ISSN 1947-5500
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Experiences and Comparison Study of EPC & UML For Business Process & IS Modeling
Business process modeling is an approach by which we can analyze and integrate the business process. Using the Business Process Modeling we can represent the current and future process of a business/organization/enterprise. The business process modeling…
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