Supporting business process experts in tailoring business processes

Supporting end users to adapt business processes is rather uncommon in the context of large Enterprise Resource Planning systems. We present our new business process modeling environment, called SiSO, that enables business process experts to model and adapt business processes. SiSO enhances the descriptions of services that are provided by Service-Oriented Architectures. These enhanced descriptions focus on organizational-specific information, which makes it easier for business process experts to understand the capabilities of services in their organizational context. The information includes descriptions of services’ functions, ratings, and keywords. SiSO’s graphical user interface employs the box-and-wire UI design technique to enable business process experts to model business processes in the context of Enterprise Resource Planning systems. SiSO was qualitatively evaluated with six employees of three different companies and found useful in two application fields: (a) the visualization and automation of business processes and (b) the creation of calculations using data from different systems and sources. We think that enabling business process experts to create individual business processes is an important challenge for the design of future Enterprise Resource Planning systems.

► Empirical analysis of the application domain, by using different methods.
► SiSO: new modeling environment for business process experts.
► Enhanced service descriptions that focus on organization-specific information.
► Graphical business processes modeling based on the box-and-wire UI design technique.
► Evaluation shows usefulness for automating processes and creating calculations.