Business process management

Business Process Management (BPM) is a radical shift from traditional management thinking. Instead of taking an organization's functional decomposition as a starting point to manage the efficiency and effectiveness of operations, BPM focuses on the business processes that cut right through different departments (or even organizations). A business process can be seen as a structured set of activities designed to produce a specified output for a particular customer. As such, an effective and efficient business process is a particularly valuable asset for companies to attract and please its customers. Nowadays, Information Technology must be considered as the key enabler of high-performing business processes.Managing business processes is an inherently cyclic endeavor, which passes through different phases. The course on Business Process Management considers each of the following phases:

• Identification: the problem to distinguish which processes in organizations require priority to be managed.
• Discovery: the elicitation and specification of the way that operational processes are carried out.
• Diagnosis: the understanding of a process structural ability to fulfill the requirements it must meet
• Design: the planned action to increase the performance and/or conformance of business processes by changing its elements
• Execution: the execution of business processes using advanced IT, such as workflow management systems
• Control: the day-to-day monitoring of a business process to detect operational problems and violations of regulations
• The course offers students various methods, techniques and tools to carry out these phases, which include: process modeling with high-level Petri nets, process mining, process simulation, redesign best practices, product-based design theory, the use of reference models, industrial modeling tools, and the BPM maturity framework.

The focus of this course is on the integrated management of business processes, as they move through the various phases of the process life-cycle (i.e. discovery, diagnosis, design, execution, control). The particular focus is on the use of IT as prime enabler. After taking this course, the student will be able to:

• explain the organizational merits of process thinking, in particular in contrast to traditional management thinking
• identify the different phases in the management of business processes
• use modeling patterns to create process models
• communicate process designs to both end-users and IT specialists
• use process design theory to develop alternatives to existing processes
• analyze the conformance and performance of process designs before they are put in production
• analyze business processes based on mining their event logs
  describe and understand the main features of Process-aware information systems

You must meet one of the following collections of requirements

• Collection 1
• Completed Final examination Bsc program
• Collection 2
• Completed Pre-Master

• Handouts focusing on Business Process Management, Redesign, and Process Mining
• Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.A.: Fundamentals of Business Process Management (second edition), Springer, 2018.