BIS I - Business Process Management

Question 1

BPM Definition

Answer 1

• Methods to discover, model, analyze, measure, improve, optimize, and automate business processes
• Allowing for incremental & continuous changes of many or all business processes
• Focuses on repeatability & predictability
• Includes approaches, e.g. Total Quality Management (TQM), Six Sigma, etc.

Question 2

Business Process Re-engineering (BPR)

Answer 2

• One-time effort to change one/two strategic business processes radically
• Generally high effort = expensive
• Interferes with established routines

Question 3

Steps in Business Process Management (BPM)

Answer 3

1) Formulate strategic vision
2) Identify & analyze existing processes that need to be changed (measure performance)
3) Identify information needs and required IT support (system design) – IT might allow for new business concepts
4) Design and implement processes
5) Establish continuous measurement and improvement

Question 4

: example BPR – Commercial-Client Onboarding

Answer 4

(Quelle: D. Desmet et al. (2015): Speed and Scale – Unlocking digital value in customer journey. McKinsey Operations, Nov. 2015)

• The initial focus of the bank’s digitization story was on relieving retail-banking customers from their most “irritating service requests” – e.g. lost debit cards, etc.
• Standardized components, a small cross functional team redesigned the processes underpinning these requests to assemble a mobile solution
• Average time required for these standard processes has been reduced from 70 to 25 days

Question 5

IT & Business Processes - IT enhances business processes by:

Answer 5

• Increasing efficiency of existing processes and manual work
  o Pre-designed, rule-based automation, e.g. Workflows (WFs) (1)
  o Responsive, “hybrid” automation, e.g. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) (2)
  o Adaptive, “intelligent” Automation, e.g. Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) (3) or Process-Mining (1-3)
• Enabling entirely new processes
  o Change flow of information
  o Replace sequential steps with parallel steps
  o Eliminate delays in decision making
  o Support new business models

Question 6

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Answer 6

• The automation challenge: “What should be automated and what should be done by humans?”
• RPA tools: (“software robot”)
  o Perform [if, then, else] statements on structured data
  o Use a combination of user interface interactions, connecting to APIs to drive client servers, mainframes on HTML code
  o Operate by mapping processes in the RPA tool language, with runtime allocated to execute the script by a control dashboard

Question 7

Trends (…?)

Answer 7

• SaaS, XaaS
• Service oriented Architectures (SOA)
• Open and Shared Source
• Platforms
• AI functions to Enterprise AS
• Robotic Process Automation
• 3D simulation (Virtual/Augmented Reality)
• Digital Twin
• IoT
• Web 2.0 functionality
• Cloud computing
• Cyber-physical Systems (CPS)

Question 8

Perspectives on Organizations & Business Processes

Answer 8

a. To support business processes, Application Systems (AS) need to be linked directly with corresponding activities – requires a process model for the value creating activities of the enterprise
b. Processes can comprise sequences (“flows”) of activities or decisions
c. Modeling processes needs to take into account:
i. Process orientation: Process cost, quality and time/effort
ii. Customer orientation: Processes’ relevance for value creation for the customer
d. Differentiate between dynamic and static processes (?)

Question 9

The Concept of views/ The ARIS house

Answer 9

a. Integration: The Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS) is an integration concept which semantically represents enterprises, their application systems, business processes and other entities relevant for business
b. Modeling: business processes are represented through models that capture all business-relevant aspects. Models abstract and document in a unified language (semantics)
c. Views to cope with complexity: the complexity of (hierarchically arranged) models is coped with by separating all aspects into coherent views. This generates an “architecture” of the enterprise

Question 10

Using the views of the ARIS house

Answer 10

1) ORganization view (das Dach)
2) Data view, Control/Process view, Function view (main body)
3) Performance view (keller/fundament)
a. Each view comprises specific model types and methods to represent relevant aspects, e.g. organizational charts
b. The views offer specialized design spaces to discuss and re-engineer specific problems, e.g. related to data management (data view)
c. Existing various interrelations towards other views thus do not need to be considered in the first re-engineering step
d. In a second step, interrelations between the entities are considered across views. They are linked within a control/process view that represents processes. This way, redundancy in the representation is avoided.

Question 11

ARIS Description Layers

Answer 11

a. Business challenge/problem
b. Concept layer
c. Information processing layer
d. Implementation layer
e. Information Technology