Tool+support+for+BPA

The title of this page was **State of the art in BPA**

Business Process Analysis (BPA) is used by major companies in various consulting services and implementation solutions. > [] > []# > @http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/bpa/overview/index.html > http://www.tibco.com/products/bpm/default.jsp
 * IBM: WebSphere Business Modeler: “provides the capabilities for business users to document, visualize, report on business process models […] plus robust modeling, simulation, and analysis capabilities to accelerate your process improvement efforts.”
 * Microsoft: BizTalk and SharePoint Server: “... use real-time data inputs combined with powerful analytical and statistical software to help forecast demand for limited resources and to design efficient workflows.”
 * Oracle Business Process Analysis Suite: “... a set of integrated products that allows business users to design, model, simulate, and optimize business processes to achieve maximum operational efficiency.”
 * SAP NetWeaver: “supports unstructured collaborative workflows, as well as highly-structured integration processes for service orchestration. At the heart of Enterprise SOA, the ESR (Enterprise Services Repository) exposes application core processes using modeled process components and enterprise services that act as key artifacts to compose new process innovation at the edge.” []
 * TIBCO Business Studio: “enables enterprises to control work comprehensively: refine it, accelerate it, manage and measure it. The imperative: to drive efficiencies up and operating costs down, while balancing automation with the work of people.”

A more detailed look at these solutions and how they are used shows that the use of BPA in various guises is still based on the same idea, and that the private sector readily applies such solutions. Trade facilitation projects and the public sector can benefit from this work by making use of the tools developed and used by industry.

Tools for BPA in the area of Trade Facilitation
Trade Facilitation projects are usually administered by governments or international organizations. Parties involved are administrative departments such as border control, port authorities, security and tax authorities.

Private industry looks for successive improvement processes rather than one-time projects. These facts needs to be considered when comparing the aims of private industry to trade facilitation goals and the tools they use.

In the area of trade facilitation, BPA needs tools to carry out the necessary steps and deliverables. Tools based on Unified Modelling Language (UML) are very commonly used to produce the diagrams recommended by the method. But higher integrated analysis tools are also useful. Different solution providers (Software and IT companies) employ different tools with individual features and areas of strength. BPA usually deals with complex problems where there is no simple solution and no "one-fits-all-purposes"-tool available.

UN/CEFACT developed a modelling methodology called **UMM**. It is based on UML and various concepts widely used in the BPA/BPM field. As a standardization organization, UN/CEFACT aims to fulfil most popular usage scenarios for their target audience. The availability of public, or at least common, tools is also an important factor. Business process analysts at CEFACT currently favour a publicly available add-on for UMM for a commercial product called Enterprise Architect (Sparx Systems).

Terms and definitions in the BPA area and differentiation to others

 * Business Process Management (BPM) is an overarching strategy to support business processes using methods, techniques and software to design, enact, control and analyse operational processes involving human beings, organizations, applications, documents and other sources of information. This strategy describes a long term effort, and provides the basis for a continuous improvement process.
 * Business Process Analysis (BPA). Compared to traditional workflow products, BPA covers additional aspects such as simulation, diagnosis and bottleneck analysis.
 * Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) is another area of BPA. Its aim is to use data automatically logged by the information system to diagnose the operational process. An example is the ARIS Process Performance Manager (PPM) of IDS Scheer [c]. ARIS PPM extracts information from audit trails (i.e., information logged during the execution of cases) and displays this information in a graphical way (e.g., flow times, bottlenecks, utilization). BAM also includes process mining, i.e., extracting process models from logs [c]. BAM creates a number of scientific and practical challenges (e.g., which processes can be discovered and how much data is needed to provide useful information).

When it comes to redesigning operational processes, two trends can be identified: Straight Through Processing (STP), and Case Handling (CH).
 * STP refers to the complete automation of a business process, i.e., handling cases without human involvement. STP is often only possible if the process has been redesigned. Moreover, STP is often only possible for a selected set of cases. This means that cases are split into two groups: (1) cases that can be handled automatically, and (2) cases that require human involvement. By separating both groups it is often possible to reduce flow time and cut costs.
 * While STP strives for more automation, CH addresses the problem that many processes are much too variable or too complex to capture in a process diagram [c]. In CH the normal route of a case is modelled but at the same time other routes are allowed if not explicitly excluded.

Relevance for trade facilitation
For most trade facilitation projects, the steps shown in this Guide and the methodology outlined can be simply applied to provide the structure and approach needed for a successful project independent of any tools.