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Modelling Configurable Business Processes (MOCO) |
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MOCO Chief Investigator: Prof Michael Rosemann Funding:
Category: 2801 - INFORMATION SYSTEMS Administering Institution: Queensland University of Technology: The research has been initiated by a presentation at the SAP Innovation Congress in Miami (February 2003). The project is part of the activities within the SAP/IDS Institute for Business Process Innovation at QUT's Business Process Management Group at the Faculty of Information Technology. The project also comprised two Honours Scholarships. These two projects were contributing in the areas of "Configuration Patterns" (Sana Khan) and "The Actual Practice of Modelling in SAP Projects" (Hui Min Tan). Also, a series of related Master theses have been comprised by the project. OverviewEnterprise Systems (ES) are extremely function-rich nowadays in order to cope with a large amount of business requirements. These functionalities, in turn, need to be aligned with the business in order to create value for the organisation. The configuration of comprehensive Enterprise Systems to meet the specific requirements of an organisation is consuming significant resources. The results of failing Enterprise System implementation projects are severe and may even threaten the organisation's existence. Current ES configuration processes are mainly dialog-driven. Along with the structure of the organisation all relevant organisational data must be provided on an item-by-item base and available functionalities of the system must be activated/deactivated. One of the main drivers for implementing Enterprise Systems is the objective to streamline business processes. A business process is a series of business functions within defined boundaries. Business process models like Event-driven Process Chains (EPCs) provide a way to visualise and individualise the system capabilities. However, as they do not provide sufficient support for the configuration of enterprise systems, they are hardly used in this context. Indeed tools providing process models for Enterprise systems are existing (e.g. ARIS for mySAP), however, they merely show how the process looks like. They do not give any hint about how to proceed if the process changes or a part of the process should or may not be executed within the organisation. Project detailsSignificance and InnovationCurrent reference modelling techniques as the ones applied by SAP are based on conventional techniques that are used by organisations for the design of enterprise-individual models. Reference models represent the entire functionality from the viewpoint that the complete system is implemented. The models are not designed to facilitate configuration. These modelling techniques do not support constructs that cover possible decisions during the implementation phase, i.e. decisions at build-time. Thus, they do not differentiate between decisions on instance level and type level. For example, an exclusive OR in a reference process model is an OR at run-time. It describes an alternative that exists for each instance of this model. Enterprise Systems and embedded workflows, however, have to be configured before they can be instantiated. Consequently, it is important that process and workflow models should not only describe alternatives at run-time, but also at build-time. This is essential in order to clearly communicate the system potential to project members, workflow engineers and involved users. This research project will further extend SAP's methodology for the design of inter-organisational business processes in a way that it will be possible to specify alternative system configurations. This study will increase the quality of SAP's reference models. It will provide a conceptual modelling technique that truly visualises the potential of mySAP applications in intuitive models. The proposed approach will among others explore the use of process configuration patterns to capture the decisions made during the model configuration. They support the building of cumulative design knowledge and aid reasoning, communication, and critical reflection about the process and the design, and they are an important resource for reuse and redesign processes. This work will furthermore extend SAP's current methodologies. It will provide an intuitive layer on top of existing reference models. This layer can be individualized for different stakeholders ("multi-perspective modelling"). It will allow providing project managers with a high level model focussing on the mandatory and critical configuration decisions. End users can navigate down to a more detailed view with less critical and more optional configurations. The outcomes of this research can be implemented by minor modifications and extensions of the existing tools, methodologies and models. They also can be integrated into the more detailed process models or workflow templates as the core of the extensions is required in the models and not in any implemented workflow technology (e.g. message queuing). It can also relatively easily be incorporated in corresponding third party tools such as the ARIS suite. This project will increase the quality and popularity of SAP's Solution Maps and Collaborative Business Scenarios. The proposed technique will be unique and highly relevant in the context of packaged software solutions. It will be based on a widely used technique but will also consider the requirements of configuration management. It will allow the involvement of business users in the early phase of the business blueprint design and increase the acceptance and overall use of semi-formal modelling techniques in Enterprise Systems projects. The explicit description of configuration points will also reduce the perceived complexity of the SAP reference models. It will provide an alternative way of documenting decisions during the system configuration. ApproachThis research project will be based on the existing Solution Maps and collaborative Business Scenarios that have been developed by SAP. The proposed project has five main stages and will have significant synergies with two SAP-funded Honours projects at our Business Process Management Research Group. First, typical process configuration patterns for the available modelling methodologies will be derived. These patterns will provide valuable insights into the actual requirements in terms of configurable models. The patterns will be classified and characterised based on different criteria. The proposed methodology for the configuration of reference process models will be specified in a meta model. This model will show what extensions of this technique are required in order to depict alternative configurations in Enterprise Systems. The Implementation Guide of the involved SAP applications in conjunction with the SAP models will be used to derive and classify typical configuration patterns, for example in Solution Maps and collaborative Business Scenario Maps. This phase will consume three months. Second, alternative ways for the visualization of these configuration patterns will be developed. These techniques will be derived from alternative modelling techniques and also include new ways of extending the existing notations. This phase will consume two months. Third, the developed modelling technique will be tested in experiments with experienced SAP customers and post-graduate students at the Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University of Technology. In these experiments the participants will evaluate how intuitive, comprehensive and precise the proposed modelling technique is. Furthermore, it will be evaluated against competing contemporary reference process modelling techniques. The results of the experiments will be used to revise and further improve the proposed methodology. This phase will take two months. Fourth, the developed configurable reference process modelling languages will be implemented in a series of proof-of-concept prototypes, for modelling purposes as well as for other reference model configuration support such as model translation, configuration evaluation and validation, or process execution. This phase will take three months. Fifth and finally, all results will be summarised in a final report. A final presentation will be made to SAP representatives. This final phase will take two months. Research teamProfessor Michael Rosemann Publications (Background IP and Current Publications)The research has been presented at the SAP Innovation Congress in Miami (February 2003), a research seminar at the University of Queensland (May 2003), at the SAP headquarter in Walldorf, Germany (July 2004), at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Centre in New York, United States (April 2005), at the European Research Center for Information Systems in Muenster, Germany (June 2005) and as a final project report at the SAP Research Centre Australasia Brisbane, Australia (August 2005).
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