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Configuration and Management of Process Variants

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Handbook on Business Process Management 1

Part of the book series: International Handbooks on Information Systems ((INFOSYS))

Abstract

This chapter deals with advanced concepts for the configuration and management of business process variants. Typically, for a particular business process, different variants exist. Each of them constitutes an adjustment of a master process (e.g., a reference process) to specific requirements building the process context. Contemporary Business Process Management tools do not adequately support the modeling and management of such process variants. Either the variants have to be specified in separate process models or they are expressed in terms of conditional branches within the same process model. Both methods can result in high model redundancies, which make model adaptations a time-consuming and error-prone task. In this chapter, we discuss advanced concepts of our Provop approach, which provides a flexible and powerful solution for managing business process variants along their lifecycle. Such variant support will foster more systematic process configuration as well as process maintenance.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    If only single elements are affected by a particular change operation, their process element IDs may be used alternatively.

  2. 2.

    Note that this example indicates that we need more advanced change support considering the special semantics of adjustment points. Generally, the user should be able to define whether adjustment points may be deleted when applying certain change operations or shall be kept in the intermediate model. In the latter case, the deleted activities and nodes respectively are replaced by silent activities without associated actions. Generally, silent activities and adjustment points are removed after application of all selected options.

  3. 3.

    For a formal semantics of respective change patterns, we refer to (Rinderle-Ma et al. 2008).

  4. 4.

    Note that every change operation supported by Provop requires specific considerations here.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Group Research and Advanced Engineering, Daimler AG, Ulm, Germany

    Alena Hallerbach

Authors
  1. Alena Hallerbach
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  2. Thomas Bauer
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  3. Manfred Reichert
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Alena Hallerbach .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Systems, University of Liechtenstein, Fürst-Franz-Josef-Strasse 21, 9420, Vaduz, Principality of Liechtenstein

    Jan vom Brocke

  2. Faculty of Science and Technology, Queensland University of Technology, 126 Margaret Street, Brisbane, Qld 4000, Australia

    Michael Rosemann

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Hallerbach, A., Bauer, T., Reichert, M. (2010). Configuration and Management of Process Variants. In: Brocke, J.v., Rosemann, M. (eds) Handbook on Business Process Management 1. International Handbooks on Information Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-00416-2_11

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