Fundamentals of Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is the art and science of how work should be performed in an organization in order to ensure consistent outputs and to take advantage of improvement opportunities, e.g. reducing costs, execution times or error rates. Importantly, BPM is not about improving the way individual activities are performed, but rather about managing entire chains of events, activities and decisions that ultimately produce added value for an organization and its customers.

This textbook encompasses the entire BPM lifecycle, from process identification to process monitoring, covering along the way process modelling, analysis, redesign and automation. Concepts, methods and tools from business management, computer science and industrial engineering are blended into one comprehensive and inter-disciplinary approach. The presentation is illustrated using the BPMN industry standard defined by the Object Management Group and widely endorsed by practitioners and vendors worldwide.   

In addition to explaining the relevant conceptual background, the book provides dozens of examples, more than 100 hands-on exercises – many with solutions – as well as numerous suggestions for further reading. The textbook is the result of many years of combined teaching experience of the authors, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as in the context of professional training. Students and professionals from both business management and computer science will benefit from the step-by-step style of the textbook and its focus on fundamental concepts and proven methods. Lecturers will appreciate the class-tested format and the additional teaching material available on the accompanying website fundamentals-of-bpm.org.

Marlon Dumas is a professor of Software Engineering at the University of Tartu, Estonia, and Strategic Area Leader at the Estonian Software Technologies and Applications Competence Centre (STACC). He is co-editor of a textbook on Process-Aware Information Systems (Wiley, 2005) and has taught BPM both in academia and as a professional trainer for more than ten years. He is also an active BPM researcher with a focus on process modeling, analysis and refactoring.

Marcello La Rosa is an associate professor and the IS School Academic Director for corporate engagements at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He is also a Researcher at the National ICT Australia. Marcello leads the Apromore initiative – a strategic collaboration between various universities for the development of an advanced process model repository. His research interests focus on process consolidation, configuration and automation. Marcello has taught BPM to students and practitioners in Australia for over five years.

Jan Mendling is a full professor with the Institute for Information Business at the WU Vienna, Austria. Prior to that, he held appointments at the HU Berlin and QUT Brisbane, and was a visiting researcher at Eindhoven University of Technology, IBM India Research Labs Bangalore, City University of Hong Kong and University of Ljubljana. His main research interests are in business process management and process modeling. Jan has taught BPM to students and practitioners at different institutions in Europe and Australia. He is co-founder of the Berliner BPM-Offensive, a practitioners’ forum for BPM.

Hajo A. Reijers is a full professor with the department of Mathematics and Computer Science of Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, and is the head of BPM research at Perceptive Software. Previously, he worked as a management consultant in the BPM field. Hajo has taught BPM to students at all academic levels and provides training to practitioners at the TIASNimbas Business School. He is one of the founders of the Business Process Management Forum, a Dutch platform for the exchange of knowledge between industry and academia.