Reverse Engineering of Enterprise Business Processes - Enterprise Information Systems Design, Implementation and Management: Organizational Applications - page 105

Figure 5. The behavioral view

course parts connected by a succession link: if
the beginning (or the end) of the predecessor is
followed by the beginning (or the end) of the
successor. In an Immediate succession, which
is a special type of succession, the predecessor
follows immediately the successor.

about its processes. He will investigate the global
processes and discover little by little their structure
until meeting the structure of the activities of each
process. Then, the modeler will use a Bottom-Up
approach by identifying activities and composing
them iteratively. The composition of activities
should respect the two principles of coupling and
cohesion (Papazoglou & Van Den Heuvel, 2007)
to construct processes that are highly coherent
internally and weakly coupled between them. The
definition of the activity granularity and the criteria
for coupling and cohesion will perhaps change the
organization of the business components to build
flexible and efficient models.
The modeling context may also influence the
choice of the granularity of activities and the
criteria of coupling and cohesion. We propose
a reverse-engineering process composed of 3
phases, presented graphically as a BPMN process
in the figure 6. The originality of our approach
lays in the use of the phase “Restructuring and
modeling” used to organize and restructure col-
lected information. Not only BPMN models will
be constructed but also process models represent-
ing the other views of the business process. Each

A process for reVerse-
engineering business
processes

For organizations with unmodeled business pro-
cesses the modeler must perform a hard work to
collect the different information needed to reorga-
nize and build efficient models. According to the
functional view of the metamodel, several levels of
composition must be identified to reach the final
structure of the business process. In our approach,
these composition levels correspond to abstraction
levels as moving from one level to the other will
eliminate details and preserve the most important
functionalities. While collecting information the
modeler should follow a Top-Down approach in
order to identify the real vision of the enterprise