Business Process
There are many business process definitions. The current Wikipedia definition is, "A business process or business method is a collection of related, structured activities or tasks by people or equipment which in a specific sequence produce a service or product (serves a particular business goal) for a particular customer or customers.”
Some other definitions of business process are cited in the literature:
“A structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific output for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization...” (Davenport, 1993);
“A series of steps designed to produce a product or service. (...) Some processes result in a product or service that is received by an organization's external customer. (...) Other processes produce products that are invisible tothe external customer but essential to theeffective management of the business...” (Rummler & Brache, 1995).
Considering these definitions, we can conclude that the business process is a set of coordinated and prioritized activities that organizations implement by a group of actors to achieve a concrete goals and to meet the needs of internal and external customers.
Business Process Management
Most organizations implement hundreds or even thousands of processes depending on their goals and delivery methods, to add value to customers and staff or to comply with regulations. This generates a certain complexity in the visibility of these processes. In addition, human activities accentuate the complexity of the process, hence the need for continuous improvement and evaluation to achieve optimal management of the organization. Thus, any organization wishing to deal with the complexity of its operations needs a flexible tool to manage all situations. For this purpose, the BPM solution, which promotes communication and common understanding between different levels of the organization, enables effective business process management by focusing on value-added steps and so satisfies customer needs with a low cost.
Indeed, BPM generates a more holistic improvement approach rather than focusing on simple process improvement at the task or team level with a natural tendency to write procedures. BPM’s mission is to model, deploy, execute, continuously optimize the different types of processes and hence improve the agility of an organization. In general, the Business Process Management approach includes the following phases:
Some advantages of BPM are (Pavel & Pergl, 2015; Gulledge & Sommer, 2002):
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Clear visibility and better knowledge of an organization’s activities;
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Precise definition of tasks and roles within a company;
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Identification of potential optimization areas;
Business Process Management in Public Administration
In most governmental organizations, processes are complex, late and not managed adequately, getting a great opportunity for improvement through implementing BPM. Many studies have highlighted the growing interest of public services for this method as a specific mechanism for supporting change management and a tool for improving their processes (Tregear & Jenkins 2007, Ferreira et al., 2018; Garvin & David, 2019).
Several reasons urge the public sector to adopt business process management, we can cite, among others the commitment of governments to make public offices more creative by developing modern channels to offer services at a lower cost and the claim to increase levels of service (Tregear & Jenkins, 2007); Moreover, many recent management initiatives require this method (Recker, 2010), because it has the advantage of minimizing costs, reducing response time and the bureaucratic complexity that prevents public institutions from efficient functioning.
Other important benefits of BPM for public service are (V¨olzer, 2010; Dijkman & Gorp, 2010): Improve coordination between organizational units.
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Facilitate documenting, analyzing, communicating and improving process performance.
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Provide visibility into the real-time status of the entire end to end processes.
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Ensure continuous improvement of the quality of services provided and cost reduction.
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Permit increased transparency and oversight for responsibility.
By ensuring clear documentation, defining responsibilities, and providing an integrated approach with no complex procedures or hierarchical control (Machine, 1997), BPM becomes a valuable tool in the modernization efforts of public organizations (Smith & Fingar, 2003).
According to Ferreira et al. (2018), activities in a BPM diagram must be classified into those that add value and those that not add value in order to eliminate the latter group; however, they mentioned that the greatest obstacle confronted in promoting BPM is the difficulty to eliminate the non-added values activities because of the legal characteristics of the public services. Furthermore, from our experience in a Moroccan public service, we can avow that dysfunctions encountered in professional activities often arise from incomprehension, misunderstood and poorly defined responsibilities. So, we believe it is interesting to focus on the management of business processes to control and optimize flows between processes. (Garvin & David, 2019) states that “All starts with a simple but powerful idea: organizations accomplish their work through linked chains of activities cutting across departments and functional groups.” Also, (Dumas et al., 2013) claim that the implementation of business process management solutions in public sector organizations is a powerful means to raise operational challenges and provide better public services with increased efficiency.
Selecting a Modelling Notation
The BPM acronym refers to both business process modelling and business process management. We have seen that business process management is a systematic approach to making processes more efficient in meeting the changing needs of customers. While business process modelling is a graphical representation of business activities or functions in an organization, it is used to document and map the current flow of activities in the process to identify possible improvements that allow accomplishing tasks quickly.
The choice of a standard notation model will surely promote communication and coordination throughout a process. Also, at the design level, the use of standardized language makes it easier to understand models and allows managers to build a complete picture of processes. Given the particular characteristics of the public sector, the modelling method to be applied must meet the following requirements:
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Providing a simple and quick representation of the process with less effort.
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Creating maintainable process models with minimal effort.
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Creating an analyzable process model that identifies the specific weaknesses of the process.
There are many graphical representations for business process modelling in practice, for example Business Process modelling and Notation (BPMN), Event-driven Process Chain (EPC), Unified Modelling Language (UML), etc... The main difference between them lies in their use.UML is mainly used by software developers, EPC is used for resource planning and BPMN by business process analysts (Pavel & Pergl, 2015).
In this document, we will model a process using BPMN. This graphical language provides managers with a standardized notation that enables to document and communicate their business processes within their organization and with their external partners (Hammer & Champy, 1993). BPMN is derived from the UML language and enriched with other functionalities to represent different events, exceptions and transactions. It is established as a strong standard to model business processes (OMG, 2009).
In recent years, BPMN has received more attention in the private sector management literature, and its benefits are well known (Zur Muehlen & Ho, 2008; Pavel & Pergl, 2015):
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It can be learned quickly.
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It allows the mastery of business processes with no special method.
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It creates models easily readable by everyone.
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It is flexible to bring creativity and cooperation between employees.
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It can intuitively represent many real-life situations, facilitate process design and improve the quality of communication between participants by linking all activities to satisfy customers.
The public sector can also enjoy the benefits of this language as (OMG, 2013) notes:
«The Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) is the de facto standard for representing in a very expressive graphical way the processes occurring in virtually every kind of organization one can think of, from cuisine recipes to the Nobel Prize assignment process, e-mail voting systems, travel booking procedures, to name a few ».
The notation was introduced in 2001 by the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI) and subsequently adopted by the Object Management Group (OMG) which absorbed BPMI and its projects. According to the OMG, the primary goal of BPMN is:
« To provide a notation that is readily understandable by all business users, from the business analysts that create the initial drafts of the processes, to the developers responsible for implementing the technology that will perform those processes, and finally, to the business people who will manage and monitor those processes. Thus, BPMN creates a standardized bridge for the gap between the business process design and process implementation. » (Chinosi & Trombetta, 2012). Also, BPMN can be used in different ways, thus a company can use BPMN to model its internal processes of analysis and improvement, while another could use it to model their interactions with its partners (Torres et al., 2010).
The BPMN2.0 Standard
BPMN comprises many graphical symbols (around a hundred graphic object) and a list of attributes (usually invisible on a diagram). However, the large majority of these are variants of basic graphic representations.
The BPMN2.0 version explores the various definitions of the term process, then presents the key elements of a BPMN diagram and discusses the different categories of schemas supported by this standard (Orchestration, Choreography and Collaboration).
The main elements of a BPMN process are the “objects flow” (activities, events and gateways) and the “sequence flow”.
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Activity: BPMN provides the activities object as the modeling element to represent atomic work that a business process can perform. Commonly, the activities represent actions performed by a human or a computer service. The BPMN standards categorize the activities into the following forms: Service, Receive, Send, User, Script, Manual, Reference and None.
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Event: The events object represents everything that happens and influences the progress of the flow (start, pause, end, stop, error, wait for a signal, etc.). The elements described by the norm are differentiated by their shapes and the thickness, continuity or discontinuity of their features. No color attribute is defined in the standard. However, for aesthetic and/or ergonomic reasons, the modeling software presents colored versions of these symbols. Thus, representing the “beginning” elements in green and the “ending” elements in red is an informal rule frequently adopted by modeling tools.
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Arrows, called sequence flows, connect these actions. They represent the flow of the process.
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Gateway: Gateway represents junction points where the flow splits into parallel or conditional.
All these elements constitute what is called in the BPMN jargon «Orchestration». Orchestration template describes the flow of a process within an organism in simple way. However, a BPMN diagram may contain over one orchestration. If so, each orchestration appears within its container called a Pool representing the limits of the process. This pool is divided into lanes representing the actors of the process. We can know who does what by looking in which lane has located the task.Different “pools” represent different independent processes. A “sequence flow” connection can never go beyond the boundaries of a pool. However, different processes can communicate through “message flows” representing the directions of the exchanges.