Article 8 October 1996 He wlet t- Packar d Jour nal 1 Bu siness P rocess Flow Manage ment and its Applicatio n in the Telecommunications Management Network HP OpenPM is an open, enterprise-capable, object-oriented business process flow management system that manages business activities supporting complex enterprise processes in a distributed heterogeneou s computing environment. It is a middleware service that represents a substantial evolution from traditional w orkflow technologies. by Ming- Chien Shan, Jame s W . Davis, Weimin Du, and Qiming Che n Business process reengineering is emerging as one of the crucial business strategies of the 1990s. Business process reengineering is the fundamental rethinking and reimplementation of business processes to achieve never-before-possible levels of qual ity , cost, thr oughput, and s ervice. This is especially si gnif icant in an e ra of wo rkforce downsizing and greater demands for shortened time to market and faster customer r esponse. The need for business process reengineering is pervasive. Organizations are cu rren tly engag ing i n business proce ss re engineering in many domains, including financial services, telecom services, healthcare services, customer order fulfillment, manufacturing procedure automation, and electroni c commerc e. While business process reengineering provides a business management concept, business process flow management (BPFM) software—or more accurately, middleware—provides the enabling technologies for business process reengineering to support flexible solutions for the management of enterprise-wide operations, including: Process flow control, automation, and monitoring Resource allocation, authorization, and authentication Task initializ ation and data exchan ge End-to-end communication and security. BPFM is more th an just a te chnology . It off ers a n overall envi ronme nt and a pproa ch to unifying , automat ing, and mea suring business p roces ses. In addition, BPFM i s not a tec hnology suppor ting only business p rocess reen gi neering. It can be used to manage existing nonautomated legacy processes—what is often called “paving the cow paths.” Business Process Flow M anageme nt Sy stem At the ente rprise level, the process t o be managed ca n be very complex, spanning several organizations with multipl e steps being perf ormed in parallel . In such cases, a BPFM system can act as the superstructure that ties together disparate systems whose business purposes are interconnected. A BPFM system provides procedural automation of a business process by managing the sequence of process activities and the invocation of appropriate human, instrument, or computer resources associated with various activity steps. It involves the high- level specifi cation of flows, and provides the opera tional gl ue and environment su pport for managing and autom ating the flows, recovering from fail ures , and enforcing consiste ncy. A BPFM system also e nforces various admini strative polici es associated with resources and work. The structure and flow of a business process managed by a BPFM sy stem can be preplanned or ad hoc. In the case of a BPFM system man aging the pro cess of pro vi ding telecommunications se rvice, the fl ow of the proc ess is ad hoc an d depend s on the services required by a customer. However, certain aspects of the process will be preplanned and deliberately structured. For instance, regardless of the individual services required by a customer, the process always originates in the sales department and is always ends in the billing department. Typically , a BP FM syste m: Provides a method for defining and managing the flow of a business process. Supports the defini tion of resources and their attributes. Assigns resour ces to work. Determines which next steps will be executed within a business process and when they will be executed.
