Business Process Automation Solution — Then and now.
I will be writing series of blog posts focused on Business Process automation, standards like BPMN, CMMN and DMN, and most importantly my experience about deploying one such solution in large organization using Flowable.
I will keep updating this index for easier navigation.
Part 1 — Business Process Automation Solution — Then and now (This)
Part 2 — BPMN, CMMN, and DMN — Triple Crown of Process Improvement Standards
Why we need Business Process Automation Solution?
The term “Process automation” dates long back to the industrial revolution when due to increased demand and competition company owners and managers were looking for a solution to minimize cost. We all know about the story of Henry Ford and how we revolutionized the auto industry by introducing assembly lines. Rather than one person is responsible for overall quality, the responsibility is shouldered upon a group of people who coordinate to create a quality product.
Fast forward to the so-called Digital era, when each business is coming online, they needed a similar solution to encode the business processes into code, so that rather than human manager looking over assembly line, some intelligent system will guide other system components. And that leads to multiple business process automation solutions.
Let’s take the example of the visitor management system. When you visit an industrial zone, you are required to present your id-card, your appointment letter, and to whom you want to meet. Based upon the information provided, the operator will hand over you security access, or entry pass. Once you do all your work and return your access will be revoked. If you want to develop a solution to address this, you need to write a fully functional application, but what your business tells you to modify your solution to handle visitor management of residential zone, then it becomes somewhat harder (it’s still possible to manage this use case) for you to reuse your custom build code. The intention is just let you give a sense about we need a solution to manage business use case which can handle a wide variety of scenarios in a consistent way.
One of the ways to handle the above use case is via Business Process Modeling Notation, a multi-vendor standard maintained by OMG (Object Modelling Group). As the name suggests, it’s a standard to model your business processes using graphical notations.
How to model business processes?
There are different business process modeling techniques each focusing on one particular aspect of modeling.
Conclusion
The workflow modeling techniques are present since the 19th century, while the newest additions being CMMN and BPMN in the first decades of the 20th century. These solutions came a long way from monoliths to becoming a low code platform, so that the technical team can focus on optimizing workflows, finding insights from data, and reporting rather than writing and maintaining the solution from scratch.
