Authors:
Alena Hallerbach
1
;
Thomas Bauer
1
and
Manfred Reichert
2
Affiliations:
1
Group Research and Advanced Engineering, Daimler AG, Germany
;
2
Institute of Databases and Information Systems, Ulm University, Germany
Keyword(s):
Process Management, Process Configuration, Process Variants, Context-aware Process Customization.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Modeling Concepts and Information Integration Tools
;
Modeling Formalisms, Languages and Notations
Abstract:
When designing process-aware information systems, often variants of the same process have to be specified. Each variant then constitutes an adjustment of a particular process to specific requirements building the process context. Current Business Process Management (BPM) tools do not adequately support the management of process variants. Usually, the variants have to be kept in separate process models. This leads to huge modeling and maintenance efforts. In particular, more fundamental process changes (e.g., changes of legal regulations) often require the adjustment of all process variants derived from the same process; i.e., the variants have to be adapted separately to meet the new requirements. This redundancy in modeling and adapting process variants is both time consuming and error-prone. This paper presents the Provop approach, which provides a more flexible solution for managing process variants in the process life cycle. In particular, process variants can be configured out o
f a basic process following an operational approach; i.e., a specific variant is derived from the basic process by applying a set of well-defined change operations to it. Provop provides full process life cycle support and allows for flexible process configuration resulting in a maintainable collection of process variants.
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