Week 2

Question 1

What is a business process?

Answer 1

A business process is a collection of activities, events, and decisions that collectively lead to an outcome that brings value to an organizations’ customers.

Question 2

Business Process Management (BPM)

Answer 2

BPM is a body of methods, tools and techniqueto redesign, discover, analyze and execute business processes. It looks at the entire chain of events, activites and decisions.

Question 3

Categories of a business process

Answer 3

• Order-to-cash: starts with customer placing an order and finishes with payment
• Quote-to-order: customer requesting a price quote and ends with placing order.
• Procure-to payment: starts with determination that a given product or service needs to be purchased, ends with delivery and payment.
• Issue-to-resolution: customer raises an issue, both agree that issue has been resolveed
• Application-to-approval: customer applies for a privilege, ends with approval/denial

Question 4

Ingredients of a business process

Answer 4

• Events happen instantenously, they have no duration and they trigger a set of activites
• Activites have duration
• Decision points are points in time when a decision is made that affects business processes
• The execution of a process leads to an outcome

Question 5

BPM lifecycle

Answer 5

• Process identification
• discovery
• analysis
• redesign
• implementation
• monitoring and controlling

Question 6

Role of Algorithms

Answer 6

• assign tasks
• make processes more efficient
• can reduce costs

Question 7

Business process modelling and notation BPMN

Answer 7

Cirles - events (arrival of equipment) begin with noun end with verb in past participle
Rectangles- activities (inspecting equipment) begin with verb
Decision points (returning or keeping equipment)

Question 8

Tokens

Answer 8

Tokens are depicted as a colored dot on top of a process model. They show the progress of a given instance of the process.

Question 9

Gateways

Answer 9

A gating mechanism that allows or disallows the passage of a token.
As tokens arrive at a gateway they are either merged on input or split on output.

Question 10

Why is XOR gateway used?

Answer 10

To model exlusive decisions

Question 11

Whys is AND gateway used?

Answer 11

To model parallel execution

Question 12

Why is the OR gateway used?

Answer 12

To model inclusive decision
More than one outcome can occur at a given time
Use only if XOR and AND don’t suffice

Question 13

Resources

Answer 13

Resources are anything or anyone involved in the performance of an acticity such as equipment, software, participants.

Question 14

Pools

Answer 14

• Generally used for resource classes
• Business parties, such as seller, buyer, supplier, etc.

Question 15

Lanes

Answer 15

• Used to partition a pool into different classes
• Department, business unit, team, software system, etc.

Question 16

Data perspective

Answer 16

• Indicates which artifacts are required to perform an activity
• Indicates which artifiacts are produced by an activity

Question 17

Data objects

Answer 17

• Information flowing in and out of activites
• Can be physical or electronic
• Document with upper right corner folded

Question 18

Data stores

Answer 18

• A place containing data objects (magazin)
• Cylinder

Question 19

How is Token affected by data objects?

Answer 19

• Input data objects are required for an activity to be executed
• Output data objects only affect a token flow indirectly

Question 20

Reason for modelling a process

Answer 20

To better understand the process and to identify and prevent issues.

Question 21

What are ARCs?

Answer 21

ARCs- sequence flows, represented by arrows with a full arrow-head

Question 22

Lables

Answer 22

Names given to activities and events. Avoid lables with more than 5 words exluding prepositions and conjunctions.

Question 23

What is the difference between a process model and a process instance?

Answer 23

A process model depicts all the possible ways a business process can be executed, while a process instance captures one specific process execution out of all possible ones.

Question 24

How do pools interact?

Answer 24

Through message flows which can be directly attached to the boundary of a pool, should the details of the interaction not be relevant.

Question 25

What are the different modelling perpectives?

Answer 25

• Functional perspective: covers the different activities performed in a business model
• Control-flow perspective: relates these activities to events in a given order
• Data perspective: covers the artifacts manipulated in the process
• Resource perspective: resources that perform various activites