ARIS using BPM for students

ARIS using BPMN for Students

As a student from Carnegie Mellon University, I have been introduced to the basics of BPM in school, but yet the resources on the BPX Community have been very useful for various topics related to BPM and SOA.

Since the community is rich with knowledge and information, it is a great place for a student to learn from experts who hold tremendous knowledge and years of experience in the industry.

Considering this, I have taken the initiative to represent a basic yet real world business example on ARIS, a popular business modeling tool using the concepts of BPM. The example is kept relatively simple mainly for 2 reasons:

• Students with little or no knowledge of BPM concepts can get an idea of modeling on ARIS.
• Experts can build on the use case presented and gradually develop it into a more sophisticated and complicated example.

The article by Natty Gur is a great one to look at and most of my concepts have been derived from it. I would highly recommend readers to review this document to understand concepts like pools, lanes, functions, events etc.

(http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/go/portal/prtroot/docs/library/uuid/90126032-e589-2910-1ca6-f97c96e86130)

Use Case Scenario:

Claims handling in the Insurance Industry

Task:

Handling claims for the replacement of a windscreen of an automobile

Initial Goal:

Draft the process

Future Goals:

1. Add constraints and challenges to the existing scenario
2. Optimize the existing process to use less resources

Story:

The scenario has been categorized in phases and each phase is represented with a modeling example.

Phase 1:

Tom (the customer) has damaged his car’s windscreen after driving recklessly on a Friday night. Since the damage is serious, he needs to get Safeside Insurance (Insurance Company) to pay for it.

On the other hand, Safeside Insurance has a number of customers like Tom with claims for various accidents, who call up and hence Safeside Insurance has assigned the task of entertaining customers to an independent agent who is also responsible for the call center which could be in any part of the world. Tom’s policy also says that if the claim is approved he shall interact directly with the vendor selling the item.

Action:

Understand the organizations involved and the roles people play in that organization. Differentiate these in terms of pools and lanes.

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Phase 2:

After the accident, Tom realizes that he needs to get the insurance company to pay for the damage. He gathers all the information that is needed about his car, his insurance policy and the accident and calls the toll free number. The call is routed to the call center where Tom talks about his problem. The agent understands the problem, classifies it and validates Tom’s information with the system. This is later compiled and forwarded by a different department in the organization to Safeside Insurance.

Action:

Understand the functions, events and classify them into the appropriate pools and lanes based on actions.

Phase 3:

Safeside Insurance gets Tom’s application and starts verifying it. It researches on the case, tracks Tom’s history and makes a decision.  If Tom’s request is not convincing then Safeside would like more information from Tom before it can make a decision. Tom would like to avoid this as much as possible to get his claim soon.

Action:

Evaluate the functions and duties of various people. Branch out tasks which are based on decisions.

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Phase 4:

If Tom has a convincing story, the claim will get processed. After processing it, Safeside will record every kind of information about Tom and his claim. This would be information regarding the cause, frequency of his accidents and also the estimated cost of the damage. Tom would see this later, in the form of an increased insurance premium.

Action:

Switch the interaction between different users and note when each process terminates

Phase 5:

Once Safeside approves Tom’s claim, Tom needs to find a vendor and get a quotation. If he gets the right price, he shall buy it or else we would need to locate another vendor.

The final model is shown below:

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Action:

Validate if the model presented matches the actual business model and that the process modeled is simple and well defined.

As it can be seen, this is a simple and easy example. Through this example, I have displayed a basic business process. It would be interesting to see, how this process could be optimized further to produce an efficient task. We could also consider Safeside as a company offering other kinds of insurances and how this model could be modified to match other requirements.