The goal of the course is to equip the students with the basic tools and techniques to define, analyze, and improve business processes. In your professional career, it is inevitable that you will get involved in process-related activities. You may find yourself in the role of a professional working in a process that is being analyzed, redesigned, or supported by an information system. Alternatively, you may be managing such a process. Even more likely, you may play the role of intermediary, standing between the operational professionals executing a process and higher management that wishes organizational improvement. The knowledge and especially the skills taught in this course provide you with the basic instruments to carry out and understand BPM projects. Course objectives are as follows:
• Identify the different phases in the management of business processes;
• Model complex business processes with BPMN;
• Learn to communicate with domain experts and IT specialists on business processes;
• Qualitatively and quantitatively analyze business processes and identify process improvement actions;
• Describe and understand the main features of process-aware information systems.

Business processes are everywhere. Tasks such as booking an airline ticket online, developing a new product, or treating a patient can be viewed as processes crossing organizational and technological boundaries. To sustain a competitive advantage and face the rapidly increasing global competition, companies must continuously adapt their business processes based on changing market conditions and requirements. Organizations can gain a competitive advantage by improving and innovating their processes through a holistic process-oriented view. Business Process Management (BPM) is the discipline that combines knowledge from information technology and management sciences and applies this to manage business processes holistically. BPM provides the necessary tools and techniques to identify, document, analyze, automate, and continuously improve business processes. A substantial amount of activities in the BPM life-cycle are related to creating and using process models. Such models represent the business activities, events, and control flow relations between them and incorporate data that is being processed, organizational resources involved, and IT systems that support the performance of business processes. This course examines the different phases of the BPM life-cycle by combining process, human, and technology perspectives. Namely, the course will go through the following BPM phases with a focus on business process modeling with BPMN notation: * Identification: distinguish which require priority to be actively managed * Discovery: the elicitation and specification of the way that processes are carried out * Analysis: evaluating a process' ability to fulfill its requirements * Redesign: update process definitions to increase the performance and/or conformance of business processes by changing their elements * Implementation: the execution of business processes using process-aware information systems, such as workflow management systems * Monitoring and control: the day-to-day monitoring of a business process to detect operational problems and violations of regulations that constitute a business process.

"Fundamentals of Business Process Management" 2nd Edition (2018) by Dumas, M., La Rosa, M., Mendling, J., Reijers, H.. (ISBN: 978-3-662-56508-7)

This course is in transition for the master Business Research.
See the Master Education and Examination Regulations for more information.

The following rule applies to master Business Research students who started the programme prior to academic year 2024-2025.
TRANSITIONAL REGULATION (EBC4059):
The master Business Research has been discontinued.
Courses of the Business Research master’s programme will continue to be offered until and including academic year 2025-2026 with exam opportunities running until and including 2026-2027.


PREREQUISITES:
There are no specific prerequisites for this course. However, it does build upon the basic understanding of the role of information systems in Organisations that is provided in an introductory MIS course such as the Management Information Systems course offered to International Business students (EBC2003). For further details on the topics covered in EBC2003 and the literature that is used please refer to Canvas .
Courses and workload are very demanding for all IB Master courses. Exchange students need to have obtained a Bachelor degree in business or a related field.
An advanced level of English.