Lecturer: Prof. Dr. Hermann Krallmann & Prof. Dr. Dimitris Karagiannis

Description

Effectiveness of business processes is of major interest for competitive firms. This trend is fuelled by the emergence of e-business as a new means to reach all external and internal partners of an enterprise. Business processes have to be engineered, or re-engineered, to realize the potentials of Internet technologies.

The "Process Modelling" course recognizes this situation and introduces different methods for capturing, modelling, and analyzing business processes of an enterprise in a systematic way. Furthermore, students get to know procedures and project management methods which support their practical analyzing skills in complex enterprise situations. The course also investigates many current application areas of business process modelling in practice, like workflow management, e-business workflows, and supply chain management.

Outline

1. Introduction and overview of the course
2. The role of business processes, BP analysis and modelling in business
3. Systems analysis foundations (definitions of systems and models)
4. Models and notations
   3.1 System dynamics
   3.2 Process-oriented models and notations (Petri nets, Event-driven Process Chains)
   3.3. Data perspective of business processes and BPM
   3.4 Object-orientation and BPM
5. Tools for BPMM
   4.1 ARIS, Bonapart
   4.2 ADONIS
6. Project management for BPM projects
7. Corporate application areas of BPM
   6.1 BPMS - Business process management systems
   6.2 BPR - Business process reengineering I (best practice)
   6.3 WFMS - Workflow management systems
   6.4 Supply chain management and e-business

Learning Objectives

After completing this course successfully, students can expect to:

• understand the role of effective business processes and process orientation for creating a competitive company,
• be able to apply methods for capturing existing processes, like special interviews or questionnaires,
• understand how to manage a division based on business process models,
• know how to plan and conduct complex projects for business process reengineering,
• understand technological opportunities in the field of process modelling,
• know how to use software tools for modelling and simulate alternative BP models,
• understand and be able to model business processes in areas like supply chain management, workflow management, and e-business.

Method of teaching

This course is based on a combination of slides and an audio track (narrated text with a picture of the lecturer), case studies, practitioners' opinions, exhibits, technology examples, hyperlinks, summarizing quizzes, weekly assignment, and an online test. Given the MBI program's course type categorization, this course belongs to type 4.

One module per lesson comprises approximately 30-40 slides and a written explanation, narrated by a visible speaker. The slides provide background and details of the topics. The narrator comprehensively comments the slides to create an appropriate understanding of the content. Online cases, practitioners' opinions and various other exhibits are provided for extended insights and for practical perspectives. Links to software demos or software tools provide interactive experiences with information systems and help students to develop comprehensive knowledge about computerized solutions for the underlying types of problems.

To support the learning success, we provide summarizing quizzes for each lecture and conduct a special online test at the very end of the course. This test complements the discussion questions and exercises by testing knowledge about facts.

The rest of the weekly time is assigned for exercises and homework. In most cases an assignment consists of discussing various issues or case studies related to the topic of the very lesson. While solving these exercises, students can discuss questions and give comments via chat, online whiteboard, e-mail, telephone, and online discussions with fellow students and the lecturer's team to further the learning experience. Moodle tools are used for this purpose.

At the end, we train applying all contents to a comprehensive case study of an actual PM project.

Requirements

No formal prerequisites. The same system resources as for other VGU courses are needed.

If you take this course as an individual course, you will obtain a VGU certificate.

Credits

6.0 credit points