A key aspect to identify improvement points of the business processes (BP) of an organisation is to conduct performance management, which involves defining appropriate PPIs (Process Performance Indicators). Up to date, existing approaches to define and analyse PPIs usually focus on time and control flow aspects, leaving disregarded the organisational perspective. In this paper we extend PPINOT, a PPI metamodel, to support the definition of resource-aware PPIs in BPs enriched with resource information. Furthermore, leveraging the formal foundation of PPINOT, we introduce automated operations that relate PPIs to the people that may have an influence on them.
1 Introduction
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Unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, no proposal is able to define them, probably because the organisational perspective in BPs has been much less addressed in literature than others like, for instance, control flow.
In this paper, we address this issue as follows. On the one hand, we extend PPINOT,
a metamodel to define PPIs described in [
CRISTINA CABANILLAS MACÍAS 1 of 1 01.10.2011 2
Use Case The process depicted in Figure 1 takes place in the Andalusian Institute of Public Administration (IAAP) and represents the procedure to create and process a resource resolution proposal (RRP) for hiring people. Since we focus on resource-aware PPIs, the BP must also contain information regarding the resource assignments to its activities. Note that assigning several resources to an activity means any of them can execute it, e.g. activity Review resolution proposal can be done by a Technician of the IAAP, a Technician of the Consultative Board or a Technician of the Legal Department. These Hacienda OM !
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Technical!assistant!2!Assistoarngtsa!nisational model of the IAAP regarding Administrative positions are defined in the Resource DMocaumneangt!ewmriteern!2!tAdsseisptainctst!ed in Figure 2.
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Accountable!–!Business!Manageexr!ternal resolution out of resolved RRPs – PPI2: RRPs that required – PPI3:! Number of RRPs under review – PPI4: Number of RRPs created per technician – PPI5: Resources that review an RRP – PPI6: Average lifetime of an RRP
Note that PPI4 and PPI5 are resource-aware PPIs since they are related to the resources involved in activities Create a resolution proposal draft and Review resolution proposal, respectively. 3 Background on RAL and PPINOT As detailed in the introduction, the approach we follow to define resource-aware PPIs and to relate PPIs with the people that may have an influence on them are supported by a language to define resource assignments and a PPIs metamodel called RAL and PPINOT, respectively.
RAL is an expressive DSL that allows defining the conditions that the members of the
organisation must fulfill in order to be assigned to the BP activities [
RAL expressions can be composed (AND/OR) and negated (NOT). For instance, according to Figure 1, which only represents assignments for task duty responsible, the RAL expression for activity Review resolution proposal is ((HAS POSITION Tech. IAAP) OR (HAS POSITION Tech. CB.)) OR (HAS POSITION Tech. LD).
PPINOT is a metamodel that has been created to allow the modelling of PPIs in a way
that is unambiguous and complete, understandable by technical and non-technical users,
traceable with the BP elements and amenable to automated analysis [
Definition of Resource-Aware PPIs There are two different types of resource-aware PPIs. Next, we describe how the PPINOT metamodel can be extended to support them (cf. Figure 3).
Resource Measure. It measures the resources that perform certain task duty associated to an activity. For instance: PPI5: Resources that review an RRP. This is modelled by means of attribute measuresResource that selects the resource that is performer of a task duty (attribute taskDuty) associated to an activity. As established above, five o T s r e f e r ide na go re cca ifn co V an
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e e t g x e E L . g i F Measure type BP elements involved Time (1) The elements that are executed between the start and the end of the time measure and (2) the elements at the start or at the end if some of the time of their execution is included in the time measure.
Count (1) The element that is being counted and (2) the XOR gateways that have taken the execution path to that element.
Condition (1) The element used in the condition and (2) if the condition involves a data object, the activities that can write in it.
Data (1) The data object whose value is measured and (2) the activities that can modify the data object.
Resource The activity referred by the resource selection associated to the measure.
Aggregated (1) The elements involved in the measure that it aggregates and (2) if it groups results by some value, the data object that provides it.
Derived The elements involved in the measures used by the mathematical function that calculates the value of the measure.
Table 1: Elements involved in a PPI as defined in [
Automated Resource-Aware Analysis of PPIs
The automated analysis of PPIs is introduced in [
In this paper, we build on this idea to define a new relationship called influenced by that relates PPIs and resources. A PPI is potentially3 influenced by a person when she is potentially responsible of an activity involved in that PPI, except for PPIs defined on resource measures. In that case, the resources potentially influencing the PPI value are those that perform the specified taskDuty in the activity specified by the measure definition. For instance the resources potentially influencing the average lifetime of an RRP (PPI6) are all the people that may perform duty responsible in the activities whose duration make the average lifetime longer or shorter, i.e. activities Create RRP draft, Request report to CB, Request report to LD, Analyse report, Request external resolution, Review RRP, Sign, store & notify resolution.
On the basis of relationship influenced by, two analysis operations can be defined: Resources potentially influencing a set of PPI(s) It takes a set of PPIs and the corresponding resource-aware BP model as input and returns the set of resources potentially influencing those PPIs.
PPIs potentially influenced by a set of Resources It takes a set of resources (that can be only one resource), the corresponding reource-aware BP model and the PPIs model defined for that BP as input and returns the set of PPIs that are potentially influenced by those resources. This operation is the opposite of the previous one,
The former operation is useful to find out which the resources whose performance have an influence in more PPIs are, or to identify those resources that are not being taken into consideration by the current set of PPIs, i.e. those that are not influencing any PPI. The latter operation can assist during the evolution of BPs. For instance, if part of the organisational model evolves and is modified (e.g., a person is fired), this operation allows one to identify which PPIs could be affected.
These two operations can be automated using off-the-shelf DL reasoners by
leveraging the formal foundation based on description logics (DL) of both PPINOT and RAL.
On the one hand, in [
On the basis of these two elements, a new role inf can be defined for each measure definition md as follows: – If md is a resource measure or aggregates a resource measure, then: 9resourceP recondition :fmdg – Otherwise: 9inf:fmdg
9isP otentialResponsible(9inv:fmdg) Where isP otentialResponsible(p; a) means that P erson p can be responsible for Activity a (i.e., 9isP otentialResponsible:fag AssignmentA). 3 We perform design-time analysis and before execution the actual activities’ performers are unknown.
Given inf , the relationship influenced by can be formalised as def inition inf v inf luencedBy, where def inition(p; md) represents the relationship between a PPI p and its measure definition md.
Finally, role inf luencedBy allows expressing the aforementioned analysis operations in terms of the DL reasoning operation individuals(C), which finds all individuals that are instances of concept C. In particular: – Finding the influencing resources of a set of PPIs P P I is the same as solving
where inf luencedBy is the inverse role of inf luencedBy. – Similarly, the influenced PPIs of a set of persons P is the same as solving: individuals(9inf luencedBy :P P I)
individuals(9inf luencedBy:P ) 6
Conclusions and Future Work
This paper presents an approach to support the definition and automated design-time
analysis of resource-aware PPIs. Its main benefit is the holistic view that provides to
performance evaluation, not only considering the resource-related information, but
relating it also to control-flow, time or data information.We build our approach on top of
two proposals vastly validated: PPINOT [
As future work, we plan to validate this approach by applying it to real scenarios.
Furthermore, the integration of these results into the existing software tools PPINOT and CRISTAL is also part of our future work in this line.