Abstract
Organisations are always focussed on ensuring that their business operations are performed in the most cost-effective manner, and that processes are responsive to ever-changing cost pressures. In many organisations, however, strategic cost-based decisions at the managerial level are not directly or quickly translatable to process-level operational support. A primary reason for this disconnect is the limited system-based support for cost-informed decisions at the process-operational level in real time. In this paper, we describe the different ways in which a workflow management system can support process-related decisions, guided by cost-informed considerations at the operational level, during execution. As a result, cost information is elevated from its non-functional attribute role to a first-class, fully functional process perspective. The paper defines success criteria that a WfMS should meet to provide such support, and discusses a reference implementation within the YAWL workflow environment that demonstrates how the various types of cost-informed decision rules are supported, using an illustrative example.
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Acknowledgments
This work is supported by an ARC Discovery grant with number DP120101624. We would like to thank all our colleagues who were involved at various stages of this research study for their valuable input. They include Prof. Wil van der Aalst, Prof. Hajo Reijers, Prof. Michael Rosemann, Prof. Zahirul Hoque and Dr. Jochen De Weerdt.
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Adams, M., Wynn, M.T., Ouyang, C., ter Hofstede, A.H.M. (2015). Realisation of Cost-Informed Process Support Within the YAWL Workflow Environment. In: Bae, J., Suriadi, S., Wen, L. (eds) Asia Pacific Business Process Management. AP-BPM 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 219. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19509-4_1
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