Design by Selection: A Reuse-Based Approach for Business Process Modeling

During business process design, working procedures in organizations are represented by process models. It is an important task in any process improvement project, yet time consuming and error prone. While many organizations maintain large process model repositories, we observe that the information these repositories carry is not fully exploited during process modeling. In this paper, we present a novel approach to business process design called Design by Selection, which takes advantage of process repositories during design and facilitates reuse of process model components. These components can be static or flexible. Static ones represent the specific aspects of the process model, while flexible components realize re-use: They are defined by visual queries, which return matching process model components to be embedded in the overall process. Thus, process models can be designed in a more efficient, higher quality, and less error-prone way.