Practical BPM: Dealing with Exceptions

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By Rashid N. Khan

Business processes in every organization are replete with rules, exceptions or special conditions. As the size of the organization increases, so does the number of exceptions. A business process management (BPM) solution provides a method of incorporating these exceptions by taking actions based upon runtime conditions. This month's "Practical BPM" column explains what kinds of exceptions you may run across and how to handle them in your process mapping.

Examples of scenarios that need to be handled on a conditional basis include the following:

• Certain steps in a business process may need to be invoked only if certain conditions are true. For example, a supervisor must always review a new purchase requisition, but a manager must also review it if the amount exceeds a particular value or if the department's budget has already been exceeded.
• Business processes generally move forward. However in certain situations a process might move backwards, or even sideways. A user might return a step because of the absence of some information without which the user can't make a decision. In this case, it is most likely that the process will move back to the previous step. However, under certain conditions it may be desirable to move the process back to some prior step instead of simply the previous step. Conditions are used to determine the behavior of the process under these situations.
• When a step is completed, the process will generally move on to the next step in the process map. However, under certain conditions, it may be desirable to skip the next step and branch to some other step or steps.
• When a step becomes late, a BPM solution will generally send late notifications to the recipient or the recipient's supervisor. However, for some time-critical steps it may be advantageous to take the step away from the recipient and automatically reassign it to some other individual so that the process can be escalated.

Three capabilities are required for handling such exceptions and special conditions. First, the BPM solution has to provide a means of trapping process events. These events include the following:

Activate

This event occurs when the step is ready to be activated. It can be used to determine if the conditions required to activate the step are satisfied or to provide a mechanism of performing certain actions and pre-processing before the step is activated.

Complete

This event occurs when the step is completed. It can be used to perform post-processing or determine the activation of subsequent steps based on decisions or actions taken in the step.

Late

This event occurs if the step is late due to inaction by the recipient. This event can be used for escalation or other corrective action.

Return

This event occurs if the recipient of the step decides to return the step because of lack of information or incomplete or incorrect information. This event can be used to decide to bypass previous steps in case a step is returned under some specific conditions.

Resubmitted

This event occurs if the recipient resubmits a step that has already been completed because of new information or change in external conditions. For example, this can be used to implement process rollback.

Second, for each of the events the BPM solution provides a condition table for specifying and evaluating conditions based upon the values of process variables. When an event occurs, the condition table is used to interrogate the value of the process variables and the status of the process to determine if particular conditions in the table are true. And finally, the BPM solution provides a means of defining actions that are to be taken when the conditions are satisfied. Some possible actions may include the following:

• Abort a step
• Abort an incident
• Activate a step or steps
• Activate a script or Web Service

Each step in the business process is associated with events as described above. For each event a set of conditional statements allows the process designer to specify conditions that must be evaluated. For each condition statement that is true, there's a corresponding actions to be taken. When an event occurs, the conditional statement is evaluated and a corresponding action is taken.

Useful Links

This article is an excerpt from Rashid Khan's Business Process Management: A Practical Guide. Order your copy here:
http://www.bpmenterprise.com/yDQ

Ultimus
http://www.ultimus.com

About the Author:

Rashid N. Khan is the founder and Chief Technical and Strategy Officer of Ultimus Inc., a pioneer in business process management and workflow automation. Prior to establishing Ultimus, founded Sintech Inc., a leader in advanced software for mechanical testing. Rashid sold Sintech to MTS Systems in 1989, where he worked for a five years as a vice president and general manager. During this period he took the company through ISO 9000 certification. This experience made him aware of the need for business process management and workflow automation. Rashid obtained two undergraduate degrees from MIT in computer science and political science. Khan is the author of Business Process Management: A Practical Guide, has published numerous articles and spoken at a number of events. Contact Rashid N. Khan at info (at) ultimus.com or visit http://www.ultimus.com.

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