Pools and lanes you would be surprised but are

• Pools and lanes , you would be surprised, but are discarded by BPMSs. This is
because they capture coarse-grained resource assignments, e.g. activity “Confirm
order” is done within the sales department. When it comes to execution, we need to
define resource assignments for each task and capturing this information via
dedicated lanes (potentially one for each task) will just make the diagram too
cluttered.
• Some BPMSs tolerate the presence of these non-executable elements too. If this is
the case, we suggest to leave these elements in. Especially pools, lanes, message
flows bearing electronic objects, electronic data stores and annotations will guide us
in the specification of some execution properties. For example, the Sales lane in the
order fulfillment model tells us that the participant to be assigned task “Confirm
order” has to be from the sales department. Other BPMS modeling tools do not
support these elements, so it is not even possible to represent them in the diagram.
Modelling elements that cannot be interpreted include:
 Physical data objects:
o Acceptance pack (this is the loan offer on paper)
o Repayment agreement (this is signed by the applicant on paper and has
been replaced by the Agreement summary, an electronic document
containing a link to a digitized copy of the repayment agreement plus a
reference to the loan application). We assume all other communications
between applicant and loan provider to occur via e-mail
 Messages carrying physical objects:
o Acceptance pack
o Repayment agreement

ITECH 5404 BUSINESS PROCESS ANALYTICS AND CHANGE
o Home insurance quote (the quote is sent on paper) (does not appear in
solutions – need to fix)
 Data stores: Risk Rules DB
 States of data objects
 Pools and lanes
Question 4
Consider the loan assessment model from Question 2.
Are there any activities that can be aggregated? (9.11)
Hint: candidate tasks for aggregation may not necessarily be consecutive due to a sub-optimal order
of tasks in the business-oriented model. In this case, you need to resequence the tasks first (9.11)
 It makes sense for tasks “Prepare acceptance pack” and “Send acceptance
pack” to be performed by the same loan officer.
 However, task “Check if home insurance quote is requested” is meant to be
executed between these two tasks.
 Since there is no temporal dependency between “Check if home insurance is
requested” and the other two tasks, we can postpone the former to after
“Send acceptance pack” or parallelize it with the other two tasks.
 This way we can aggregate the two consecutive tasks into “Prepare and
send acceptance pack”.
Extension Question:
Question 5
Consider the loan assessment model from Figure 9.9. (9.12)

ITECH 5404 BUSINESS PROCESS ANALYTICS AND CHANGE
(Dumas et al, 2013, p.326)
Figure 9.9 shows the model for the sales process of a business-to-business (B2B) service
provider. The process starts when an application is received from a potential client. The
client is then sent information about the available services and a response is awaited either
via e-mail or postal mail. When the response is received, the next action is decided upon.