Innovation in business processes: Pattern-driven process modelling

Abstract

The globalization of the market has provided new challenges to small and large enterprises: the high dynamism of the business environment directly affects the consistency of business processes and the overall enterprise responsiveness. Therefore business processes, although complex, have to be highly flexible to react to new demands, in order to turn changes into opportunity in terms of process innovation and business competitiveness. This work faces this challenge and provides an approach to support business process management by means of a flexible process modeling related to the business environment. Such approach is able to manage the high variability of the environment parameters affecting the processes in use: process patterns support flexible modeling from a methodological point of view as they allow to represent the relationships between contexts and solutions; decision tables are the implementative support to the pattern theory. Furthermore, we discuss the experience of the proposed approach in a real case. Results are encouraging and drive further investigations in such a way.