Heterogeneous Business Process Consolidation: A Pattern-Driven Approach

Enterprises today usually grow through mergers, acquisitions. They are often formed in a bottom-up style, which frequently leads to problems of process heterogeneity, redundancies and inconsistencies. Take a large Chinese communication company as an example, it comprises 31 provincial subsidiaries. Due to the heterogeneity of processes, the number of its Office Automation (OA) process schemas is up to more than 8000. This status poses serious challenges for operational activities, and hinders the company from achieving global strategy. In this paper, we propose a heterogeneous business process consolidation approach based on business patterns in which a business is modeled as the interacting abstract business patterns. Each pattern can be further configured to meet a specific subsidiary's requirements. Considering the execution, each pattern is transformed into a set of connected workflow patterns or operational patterns, thus the proposed approach can be realized on most workflow engines today. To provide the global view of business, we apply Complex Event Processing (CEP) on boundaries of business patterns that are aligned among all configuration of certain business pattern. Empirical study of the proposed approach in a large company reveals positive feedback with respect to process consolidation.