Examples:

• Purchase by Tender
• Competitive Hiring

Simplified diagram depicts the essence of the pattern:

Full diagram:

Comments to the diagram:

1. The “Tender” process announces the tender, records the information in the tenders database for the future references by the bid process and falls asleep until the bid submission deadline. After that the tender record at the database is marked as closed.
2. Each sumbitted bid creates an instance of “Bid” process. Generally speaking we may run several tenders at once so the bid process starts by indentifying the specific tender the bid appllies to. It’s easy in the case of purchase by tender but when it comes to competitive hiring (where an income resume plays the role of the bid and the vacancy is tender’s equivalent) it’s a non-trivial task because people use to send resumes blindly not caring whether there is a suitable vacancy or not.
3. If the tender is successfully identified and the bid passes the qualification (in the case of hiring - the person passes interviews) then the bid is written into the database. The bid process then expects of one of two messages: either the bid is a winner or the tender has ended and the bid didn’t win.
4. The tender process sends the message to the winner after the best from the submitted bids has been choosen. There are two possible outcomes in the bid process: if everything goes smoothly we conclude an agreement with the winner. In this case a message is sent back to the tender process and the tender process informs other participants that their bids has not won. After that the tender process successfully ends.
5. If for whatever reason the agreement was not concluded then the tender process determines the next winner picking it from remaining bids. If there is no bids any more (or there were no bids from the beginning) then the tender process ends unsuccessfully.
6. It is assumed that the time interval between the bid submission and tender decision deadlines is sufficient to evaluate the request that may come “five minutes” before the submission deadline. If it happened that we evaluated all bids prior to the decision deadline then it’s possible to determine the winner earlier (not waiting for that date). In the case of hiring it makes sense while in the case of purchase probably not because in this scenario the end date is declared, well-known to participants and they usually submit the bids at the last moment. This logic can be modelled too but it would complicate the scheme considerably.

A couple of general notes:

• Repetitive actions are usually modeled in BPMN by a cycle (standard or multi-instance) or with the help of exclusive gateway. Here we model repetitive activities (processing bids) by a separate pool - each bid corresponds to an instance of the business process.
• The case for «Resource Planning» pattern is one performer / multiple orders. Here the situation is reversed: multiple potential performers for one task.

Tyrrhenian sea, Stromboli island and volcano (Italy).

Aegean sea, vicinity of Marmaris (Turkey).

Ionian sea, legendary Ithaca island (Greece).

ebizQ editor Piter Schooff recorded a podcast effectively presenting me as a «modeling guy». OK, if Peter believes modeling is a good topic right now then I’m not going to argue. The podcast is published at ebizQ: «Process discovery and modeling done right» (transcript).

Correcton: page 3 of the transcript reads -

PS: What are some best practices for effective process modeling?

AB: You might notice from my blog that I’m a proponent of process patterns. Pattern is a typical process fragment common to a number of real world processes. And the matching word for “pattern” is “recognition.” With an adequate training and some practice, a process analyst just sees familiar patterns in the process task he is working on. And this way, he or she gets the results much faster, [but] they’re more error-prone because they are based on proven fragments or patterns.

Of course I meant “less error-prone” here.

This was my second podcast at ebizQ. Prevoious podcast: «Avoiding BPM done wrong» (transcript).

When we launched bpms.ru in 2005 and when participated in first BPM conferences in 2006, there were just a handful of BPM offerings in Russia.

Now BPM has become an acknowledged brand; about a dozen of vendors actively promote it in Russia and several dozens offer consulting. Many of them have qualification, references and competence to fulfill a BPM project smoothly. Model a process, develop data model and screen forms, add business rules, org structure, integration, BAM and that’s it: the process application is ready.

But the major issues of BPM projects are not in development and not IT-related whatsoever. Two issues are common for discussions at conferences, customers’ sites and online forums: 1) how to gain measurable benefits from BPM and 2) how to ensure that BPM would be part of organization’s culture and not a one-time project.

How to get benefits from BPM project?

The question is often raised as how to sell BPM within the organization. The project sponsor isn’t willing to share the enthusiasm until being explained how the project success will improve the company’s balance sheet bottom line.

Alternatively, if a credit of trust was obtained at the project start then at the end of it the question arises how to return this credit by real benefits, preferably measurable in hard $s?

The worst case is the project successfully completed (I don’t even consider unsuccessful cases) yet there is no good answer to the simple question “so what?” - what have changed except the forms at users’ screens? False start is fatal: there won’t be a second attempt because the top management will switch to some other promising idea.

It’s better not to be there so BPM project benefits should always be evaluated before it starts. The question is two-fold: what process we are going to work on and what do we want to get from it?

The major difficulty: even if you are a superb BPM specialist, this isn’t enough to justify a BPM project. Simply because no one system can set up goals for itself - it can only be done within a scope of the super-system. In case of BPM, it’s the matter of business targets, strategy, value chain, performance gap etc.

The right sequence is: Business Issue - Process Issue - Automation Issue:

1) First of all we should decide what doesn’t make us happy at the business level?

Where do we loose money? Where the earnings are missed which is equivalent to losses? Where do we lag behind customers’ expectation? Where do we miss opening opportunities because of low agility? Where do qualified personnel and management is doing routine job?

The possible targets at this level:

• Double sales in next year and a half
• Grow up the partners network by 50% annually

2) Which business processes should be worked out to reach the targets claimed at the first step? What should be improved in these processes?

It should be done in specific, not general terms, e.g.:

• Decrease the offer preparation time from 2 weeks to 3 days
• Reduce missed delivery schedule rate to 5%
• Ensure that project managers won’t ever line up at director’s office to beat out extra resources (a real case by the way)

There must be a link between process targets and business issue from phase one.

The target may be quantative or qualitative but there should be no uncertainty. Imagine that the project is completed and everything you intended to do is done. Now ask yourself the question: «How would I know that the process improved?» If there is no clear and unambiguous answer then the project isn’t worth to do because at the end you’ll face the same damned question «so what?!»

3) Only after first two issues are resolved the third may be addressed: which functionality the process application should implement?

For example:

• Manager’s dashboard with 360-degress control of cases in progress, bottlenecks, resources utilization
• Timers and escalations for timely notifications and actions taken when process activities delay
• Critical resource (bottleneck) scheduling ensuring its maximum utilization
• Case monitoring by participants: previous activities, planned activities
• Self-service web portal for customers and/or partners: order entry and tracking, expected delivery date

The trouble of many BPM project is that they paramount automation. The customer commands: develop the process application with such and such functionality. It leads to wrong priorities and inadequate process scheme.

Only the goal setting following the scheme Business Issue - Process Issue - Automation Issue results in a system providing a tangible effect. Compared with automation-driven, such system has less micromanagement and more end-to-end process control, online monitoring and escalations.

How to turn BPM project into a long-term program?

Unfortunately BPM projects following the waterfall development - with rigid requirements and without a sign of continuous improvement - aren’t uncommon. So do one-off BPM projects that didn’t result in a competence center within the organization neither made it process-oriented.

We talked above about the link between BPM and business goals and ultimately the company strategy. Now we’ve got even deeper rooted problems - as it was well-said, «culture eats strategy for lunch». Any organization seeking for success through BPM should develop the process culture. There won’t be anything lasting otherwise despite the best strategy, BPMS software and BPM consulting.

The process culture cornerstones:

1. Process management is the systematic response to functional units’ misalignment inherent to hierarchical organizations.
2. Process management assumes a) managing the company by following formal business processes and b) managing business process lifecycle - design, execution, monitoring and analysis, re-design.
3. Business process improvement isn’t a transition to ideal «to-be» but a constant run on the horizon.
4. It’s impossible to outperform competitors by leveraging standard business processes. Key business processes are company’s know-how.

Practical implications of these provisions:

• There is no such thing as BPM turnkey implementation.
• A company must develop its key business processes internally, not seeking in the public domain or packaged applications.
• BPM should be fueled not as a fixed budget process but as a monthly amount allocated to business process improvement activities.

Developing key business process internally doesn’t mean that external consultants should not be involved. Just don’t involve “magicians and wizards” meaning that company must have internal competence allowing it to set up the process tasks properly, accept the results and get the understanding of how they were obtained.

The obviously necessary component of such competence is BPMN.

Some are scared by this notation while others underestimate its complexity. Both cases lead to troubles. In a couple of pilot projects we faced the customer that couldn’t fully understand how the process is working and more importantly how can the process scheme evolve. This is exactly what leads to a one-off project instead of the long-term program.

Why BPM should be asked at Business Console

We can disassemble any business process by customer’s choice and implement it as a process application within BizAgi BPM Suite, featuring user portal, business rules, BAM and legacy applications integration. It has become a matter of technique, a routine. But it’s not just us able to do this.

Our advantage is that apart of this we help our customers in resolving two pressing problems outlined above.

1. We’ve got a methodology to choose wisely the business process that will give maximum business benefits when implemented in BPM.

If the customer already knows where the weak spot is then it’s ok to launch the BPM project.

But if as it happens too often a number of spots are weak then we perform express analysis of business processes. It starts with value chain analysis and then proceeds by identifying the weak links of this chain i.e. the processes with maximum improvement potential.

To be precise, both jobs are done by the customer’s workgroup under our guidance. And this is much more valuable than if we as external consultants brought the results on a silver plate. Conclusions developed by company’s managers and leading specialists are much more convincing and more importantly, create positive morale - the willingness to improve business by implementing them immediately. Because the project is carried out in a short timeframe of 4 weeks, this enthusiasm doesn’t cool down.

2. We teach BPMN efficiently.

We teach not just the notation. The key point of bpmntraining.ru training is a practical work on real processes picked up by the students from their own practice.

There is a big difference between handbook exercises and real-life business processes. In the real life one faces initially a huge pile of activities which is hard to approach. The first question isn’t how to model it but rather how many processes are there?

But when the student accomplishes the mission after the homework and full day at class, the enlightment comes. From now on he/she really owns BPMN, i.e. is able to apply it in practice.

And his/her company gains the key competence necessary to implement BPM efficiently as stated above.

It’s all available right now

If the above seems reasonable for you then please consider the following Business Console offerings:

1. Invite us to lead a seminar entitled «The Modern Business Process Management».

The draft schedule: hour and half of presentation that includes BPM demonstration and half an hour of discussion of challenges your organization faces and possible ways to cope with them. There is no obligation from you except the management involvement.

2. Freely download and install BizAgi software: Process Modeler for business processes modeling and BPM Suite (Xpress or Enterprise .NET Edition) for business process modeling, execution, monitoring and analysis.

Install both at your personal laptop (BPM Suite 2 GB memory and 2 GHz processor are desirable). No extra soft is needed. Now you can implement a business process of your own in BizAgi to evaluate it.

We strongly recommend not to waste time on learning the tool by passing our BPMN training first –

3. Order training at bpmntraining.ru. Send one or more specialists to public training or if there are four or more then order onsite corporate training.

Once again there is no obligation from you yet the understanding of what BPM is and what can be done with BPMN and BPMS within your organization will increase dramatically. You’ll be able to plan any BPM initiative with great visibility - even if you will eventually choose another BPMS and another consultant.

4. Sign up for Business Console webinars showing advanced BizAgi features like integration with «1C» (the most popular local ERP) or process monitoring and analysis techniques.

At the end of the day we’d be happy to see you among BPM followers and Business Console clients, perform the express business process analysis and a BPM project for you, help to build the BPM center of competence and reach new heights in business.

I personally join those who treat BPM in the spirit of Smith and Fingar’s «Business Process Management: The Third Wave» - as a coherent discipline comprising methodology, technology (BPMS) and (I add on my own) agile implementation. Qualifying BPM features for me are 1) closed loop management of business processes and 2) bridging the gap between business and IT. I dislike the idea of introducing a new term to label practices already existed for a decade. (BPM acronym spread widely since 2003 while re-engineering exists since the early 90s and the quality management ideas apply to the 80s.)

BPM in the broad and narrow sense

So we have two basic BPM interpretations:

1. BPM in the broad sense, or business process management, or BPM as an umbrella concept - whatever methods or technologies dealing with business processes
2. BPM in the narrow sense, or Business Process Management - a specific holistic discipline (methodology plus technology plus implementation) established in the first decade of XXI century.

Some time ago Alexander Samarin proposed to develop a commonly agreed BPM definition. Sadly enough, the commonly agreed definition cannot be worked out, it can only emerge. It’s hard to reach consensus because at the end of the day each vendor and consultant claims that BPM is what his organization does. BPM is a strong brand nowadays.

This state of affairs isn’t favorable to BPM market indeed (in any interpretation of the term). What the potential BPM project sponsor should think about this range of opinions? “If you’re so smart and pretend to teach me then why can’t you agree on basic definitions with each other?”

Sometimes it generates fun: a participant of a recent bpms.ru seminar representing major Russian insurance company insisted that his company doesn’t do BPM while other participants urged him it does, appealing to his own words. So what is BPM anyway if we can’t even say for sure whether we are doing it in our own company?

I believe we should accept that there is no and won’t ever be a single interpretation of BPM, period.  Incidentally, there is no and won’t be a single interpretation of the term “business process”. Consequently, anyone who wants to speak on these topics, request or offer a service in this area must begin with a definition: what he/she personally calls BPM and what he/she calls a business process. At a minimum, the responsible professional should clarify whether he/she follows a broad or narrow-sense definition of BPM.

But it’s better to position ourselves more precisely.

A three-level BPM classification

Gartner’s BPM Maturity Model can be used as a starting point for BPM classification.

In 2006 Gartner proposed a 6-level (zero to five) BPM maturity model that I dare to summarize as follows:

• Phase 0. Functional management. Organization has yet to realize that its performance as a whole depends not only on how certain functions are performed, but also on how well these functions coordinate with each other, i.e. the quality of business processes interconnecting them.
• Phase 1. Business processes awareness. The organization explores itself through the prism of business processes. End-to-end business processes are discovered and process owners are appointed. Everyone draw process diagrams. Gaps and bottlenecks are identified and eliminated, without investments into processes automation (BPMS).
• Phase 2. Automated execution and control of business processes. The organization learns to manage business processes in a continuous loop model - execute - analyze and seeks to improve their effectiveness, mostly on a separate processes basis.
• Phase 3. Execution and control of end-to end business processes. Process boundaries are expanded under the control of BPMS, inter-process communications are worked out and end-to-end processes are established connecting the company to its customers/partners and/or their business processes.
• Phase 4. Explicit and automatic link between business goals and business processes. With the help of simulation and dynamic business rules, business goals changes trigger automatic rebuilding the network of business processes.
• Phase 5. Adaptive business structure. The ability to quickly react to changing business environment, anticipate these changes and create opportunities through deeper integration into various markets and partner ecosystems.

The last two phases, I would attribute to science fiction category. Guess nobody has seen them in reality by now, including Gartner analysts. Phase zero isn’t a process phase really, so three phases remains:

BPM-1: Business processes description and modeling

BPM-2: Managing separate business processes

BPM-3: Managing end-to-end business processes networks

Well this is a working set. The original Gartners’s model is so cumbersome and expressed in such a language that I personally am unable to explain it to an ordinary businessman.

We may further define sub-levels:

• BPM-1starts with text process descriptions, a more advanced version is graphical process modeling capable to generate text description automatically and a single repository of business processes.
• BPM-2 doesn’t always implement continuous improvement cycle, in many cases it is reduced to one-time process automation.

If both clients and vendors/consultants referred to classification above while specifying their demands and offerings respectively, then it would contribute to better mutual understanding. E.g. a customer could describe itself as follows:

We are now at BPM-1 level using text descriptions mostly. In order to pass ISO9000 certification on a regular basis, we need full BPM-1 competence on our own, with graphical models and a single process repository.

We need an external consultant with proven industry expertise and BPM-2 qualification for supporting processes in human resources area.

We need an external consultant with BPM-3 qualification for “Order-to-Cash” operational processes. In addition to the process work, it should help us create a competence center that would do 80% of the work after 12 months.

After that it could select consulting companies capable at BPM-1, BPM-2 and BPM-3, and have a close look to the toolbox:

• BPM-1 requires a process modeler/designer, Enterprise Architecture tool would also be handy
• BPM-2 can be supported by a workflow engine built-in into ECM or CRM
• BPM-3 requires a full-scale BPMS, it can be used for BPM-1 and BPM-2 tasks, too

One should not look at this classification in such a way that the levels are always better than lower ones and that we should put all efforts in advancing to higher levels for all our processes. Gartner’s model produces exactly this view and I believe it’s wrong.

The key words are “for all processes.” Trying to evenly raise the maturity of all processes is a recipe for disaster. In accordance with Pareto’s law, 20% of processes are responsible for 80% of the company’s performance. Wouldn’t it be wiser to focus on these 20%?

Sure the BPM-3 grants much more control over the processes than BPM-1. But it’s much more expensive as well! Complete BPMS implementation of an end-to-end business process is a custom IT development, apart from other considerations. And cheap custom IT development just doesn’t happen.

BPM-3 consultant can achieve more tight control over a business process yet it doesn’t entitle him to look down on BPM-1 colleagues because he/she can achieve the results in a relatively narrow front while their scope is much wider albeit maybe not so deep.

My second complaint about Gartner’s maturity model: it produces such a view phases should be passed successively, step by step. Not necessarily!

An organization infected with process management ideas may set itself a goal to get from zero to third BPM phase. OK, it’ll take time to gain the necessary competence and finally do the job but anyway the intermediate stops at levels 1 and 2 are not required.

BPMN as a common ground

Everything relating to business processes is fundamentally volatile. For example, we must be ready that in six months we come to the conclusion that some process for which we believed BPM-1 is sufficient from now on requires BPM-3. Of course we’d like investments into BPM-1 to be preserved during the transition to BPM-3.

The recipe is simple: leverage BPMN.

BPMN is methodologically neutral - in other words, it can be used in very different ways for very different purposes.

• BPM-1 requires minimum BPMN to draw analytical process diagrams
• BPM-2 requires BPMN orchestration
• BPM-3 requires full BPMN palette, including messages, signals, events, transaction subprocesses etc.

There will be certain degree of compatibility between diagrams, so transforming BPM-1 analytical BPMN diagram into BPM-2 executable BPMN diagram would be easier and much more robust than, say, producing BPMN from IDEF0. There is no real alternative to BPMN at BPM-3 so better keep with it at all levels.

The final note: we (Business Console) provides BPM-3 consultancy.

Now let’s consider more complicated case: documents arrive to the company’s post address by traditional mail. They don’t reach process participant’s desk directly but go to the general administration office.

Let’s take a banking example once again, this time a credit request from a business entity. Let’s consider the beginning phase of the process:

• client’s request initiates the process
• a clerk accepts the application by checking its completeness
• if documents are missing he/she notifies the client and the process awaits requested extra documents
• if the documents don’t arrive in 10 days the process ends with “Incomplete application” status
• after all documents are gathered the process passes to request processing that we leave out of further consideration

First, naive process version:

Fig.1 Client’s documents magically reach “his” process.

As we found in the previous post, there is an implication at the diagram on fig.1: it should be figured out somewhere which particular process instance the arrived documents are for - a simple yet necessary activity.

Let’s apply the “Incoming Processor” pattern:

Fig.2. “Incoming Processor” pattern: which process instance are these documents addressed to?

The easiest way to identify the request is by the reference number in the accompanying client’s letter. If there is no accompanying letter (we should be prepared for this scenario) then we should just look at the sender - probably we have just one active request from this client. If there are more than one then requests attributes should be compared with the documents received. Generally speaking, successful identification isn’t granted - e.g. the documents could arrive when the main credit process has timed out.

But who will obtain the documents sent by the client - right the performer of the credit process? Sometimes this is the case - it may go this way when adressee’s name and department are specified on the envelope. But we can’t be sure about it: the addressing may be wrong or incomplete, the case could be reassigned to other performer. In the general case documents will arrive to the bank’s administrative office.

Now let’s take into account that mail exchange between bank and client may happen not only on the credit matter. Generally speaking there are a number of processes - not process instanceses but different process templates - receiving a spectrum of messages from client:

Fig.3. Which messages relate to the process A and which ones to the process B?

The implication of  the scheme on fig.3: when the office receives a letter saying “please provide a credit for our company…” there is no writing on the envelope saying that this is a start message for credit request process. An incoming letter or documents package is all the office worker can see at first glance.

For this letter to transform into e.g. a credit application or extra documents requested under the credit request process someone should open the envelope, look at the document and identify it as relating to some process. After that the message can be routed to appropriate start event or incoming processor:

Fig.4. Incoming documents routing.

If all inbound correspondence passes through administrative office then most likely all outbound goes through it, too. They assign reference numbers to outbound correspondence and when processing inbound documents they check for this reference number. If it’s found then both process type (i.e. process template) and process instance identifications become much more easy:

Fig.5. “Post Office” pattern: centralized processing of all inbound and outbound correspondence.

One more thing: it’s better to use BPMN signals instead of messages in communications between the Post Office and applied processes, as depicted on fig.5.

Let me remind that signals are a sort of broadcast messages: unlike messages, they are sent not to a single process instance but to all processes awaiting it at the moment. But this aspect doesn’t matter in this case because we are dealing only with start events.

There is another reason to use signals: they provide late binding. When messages are used, one should specify sender and receiver processes at design time. In case of signal receivers are determined at run time - when it was fired. So if messages were used all processes would become interconnected via the inbound docflow; signals let us create independent diagrams for each fragment separated by dashed lines on fig.5.

And now the final note. After discussion of the last post I’m awaiting reader’s comments sayng something like this: “Let’s get rid of traditional mail. The electronic mail will arrive directly to the right addressee with scanned documents attached.”

First, it’s not always possible to replace original with copy.

More importantly, we are not in position to say to business “your procedure is too cumbersome, I can’t implement it with BPMN/BPMS so you have to streamline it”. Sure you may and should warn business that implementing the procedure this way would be harder and more expensive but it should be doable.

Never give lightweight advices to business - it has issues to solve and compromises to find while dealing with matters more complicated than BPMN.

The case considered above was raisied by a student at my BPMN training. Well it wasn’t a bank but a company that have a lot of mail exchange with different regulation bodies. All this mail goes in a very traditional way and changing it means re-educating all this government offices. The company don’t need this kind of optimization, thanks a lot.