Connecting BPM with decision-making
Many organizations have accepted business process management as a valuable way to draw effective insights from their data, reach a shared understanding of their business, and improve their processes, with the goal of increased efficiency and profitability. However, if process models are disconnected from the processes and decisions they represent, this can prevent companies from turning their BPM theory to practice and adopting a truly process-centric approach to their work.
Models separated from their relevant processes and decisions rapidly become useless if new information becomes available, contexts change, or business needs are updated. To minimize this potentially serious mismatch, decisions should be included as part of any model as decision tasks, with corresponding decision requirement graphs implemented by decision logic and knowledge models. In other words, integration between processes, data, and decisions is essential to move from BPM theory to practice.
To take one example, consider the hospitality industry. An electronic room booking process is effective. An electronic room booking process that asks individual customers for their preferences, then ties their responses to an automated advertising campaign process that develops specific customer-centric packages and forwards them only to interested customers, is something even better. This is only possible, however, once the decisions involved are clearly understood, mapped, and consistently applied.
BPM theory to practice: Room With A (Process) View
To provide a whole host of examples like the one above, Signavio has teamed up with Belgium’s Hasselt University to create Room With A (Process) View: Combining BPMN and DMN using hotel accommodation case studies.
This full-length book uses clear operational examples from the hospitality industry, workflow diagrams, and self-paced learning exercises to help you optimize your business processes using business process model and notation (BPMN) and decision model and notation (DMN).
While Room With A (Process) View assumes you are comfortable with the fundamentals of process mapping, it is structured to support learning at all levels. The book offers a ‘learning by doing’ approach that means you can dive straight in, whether you are just beginning your process improvement journey, or have years of experience turning BPM theory to practice.
Learning by doing
Each section of the book begins with a description of a hypothetical situation at a hotel, showing the corresponding BPMN and DMN models. Those readers at the start of their business process modeling can use these case studies to create BPMN models. More advanced readers can make use of the same principles to model their own process descriptions, rather than just using the examples.
Working through each hypothetical scenario in this way helps you learn the links between BPMN, DMN, and strategy. The flexibility inherent in the combination of BPMN and DMN is a significant strength, so keep in mind there will likely be some differences between your solutions and the ones presented in this book. Don’t worry; multiple solutions may be correct! In any case, the authors have annotated the answers, to give you some insights into their choices.
As you work through the book (in any order you wish—the examples are non-linear), you’ll pick up a wide range of insights and knowledge into the interplay between data and decisions, including how to construct a knowledge model. You can then use that model to predict, score, classify, and segment your customer base, your processes, or anything else you want to measure and optimize.
Room With A (Process) View aims to teach any reader to apply models of DMN, BPMN, and analytics at the right level of detail, in the proper context. In short, strategic decisions steer the processes, which then generate added value for your business. It’s an open-and-shut case!
How Signavio can help
Signavio can help your organization see and understand the way you work today, so you can make the right decisions to prepare for tomorrow. To find out more, why not sign up for your free 30-day trial today. Or, if you’d like to read more on this topic before getting started, check out Signavio’s guide to the Critical Practices of BPM and DMN.