Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Six Sigma [12] and total quality management (TQM) [13] are two
approaches to identify defects in production processes and improve the
quality of process output. Since products are the main output of business
processes, processes with associated applications and persons should be
responsible for their quality. BPMS can enforce the quality control
methodology into the process engine and continuously monitor the
process output.
A business rule management system (BRMS) [14] is a software
system to define the decision logic of an enterprise, and to provide the
result of this decision logic to other enterprise applications at run-time.
For example, a business rule may be defined as if a customer has bought
a vitamin product, issue him/her a coupon of the same brand at
checkout. Then at run-time when the checkout system asks the rule
engine, it should check the customer's purchase and decide whether or
not to issue a coupon. The combination of BPMS and BRMS has two
advantages. First of all, business rules can take the responsibility to
model the complex decision logic inside a process and drive the
decision point at run-time. This separation can make the process model
more compact and more adaptive to changes of business requirements.
Second, BPMS can record the rules that have been applied and the rule
evaluation results. These statistics provides insights into how the rules
have governed the operation of a business.
Computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) addresses how
computer systems can support group activities involving multiple people
and their coordination [15]. Typical CSCW systems include digital
whiteboard, video conferencing, groupware, wiki, and version control
software. Since designing a business process is an approach tomodel how
tasks are routed among people, BPMS can be seen as a kind of CSCW
systems in terms of its capability to coordinate multiple tasks that involve
multiple organizational units. However, typical CSCW systems can
better support ad hoc coordination or processes compared with BPMS.
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) [16] attempts to integrate all
the operations across an enterprise in a single computer system that can
serve all departments' essential needs, such as finance, accounting,
manufacturing, sales and service, and customer relationship manage-
ment. Since most enterprise operations are conducted through business
processes, BPMS can be cross-department glue to compose multiple
individual ERP components into a meaningful business function.
Moreover, BPMS can make an ERP system more flexible and
