CMMN: Holistic Approach to Operational Excellence
Not just an ad-hoc alternative for BPMN Process Modeling
In today's fast-paced and highly competitive business landscape, customer service has become a critical differentiator for organizations seeking to establish long-term customer relationships and maintain a competitive edge. To achieve this, businesses require robust process management methodologies that can effectively handle the lifecycle of customer operations.
In 2014, when CMMN (Case Management Model and Notation) was released by the Object Management Group (OMG), not everyone saw the need for something like it, and some software vendors saw no reason to invest in it. This led to confusion and misunderstanding, which didn't do CMMN any favors.
While some vendors abandoned CMMN, others luckily saw its potential and began developing technological solutions based on the CMMN/BPMN/DMN tripod. For those who believe in the Case, Process & Decision tripod for achieving operational excellence, CMMN is not just an ad-hoc alternative for BPMN, but a crucial building block for customer operations lifecycle management.
While CMMN solves some of the issues that BPMN can not or can hardly handle by adding event-based and ad-hoc processing, it goes far beyond mere process management by allowing for a holistic approach to operational excellence that exceeds the scope of one single business process. CMMN extends the scope to the lifecycle management of customer relationships, customer contracts, and corporate programs or projects.
In this article I will first elaborate on the added value that CMMN brings along for business process management. And then I will highlight how CMMN can play an important role in bringing lifecycle management to another level.
BPMN - Predictable Business Processes
BPMN is a great tool for modeling and automating highly predictable processes, in which tasks are executed in a predefined chronological sequence. It can however be quite difficult or even impossible to fully model business processes using BPMN:
if the tasks and steps need to be determined ad-hoc by human expertise during the execution of the process,
or if unpredictable events at whatever point in time can interfere with tasks and their timing.
This means that BPMN will work for certain business processes, but not for all. This largely depends on the nature of the processes and of the businesses in which these processes need to be performed.
From a methodological perspective, this creates several challenges:
Do we need two different approaches: one for structured and one for ad-hoc processes?
If yes, what do we do with hybrid processes?
If not, is it a matter of tweaking BPMN so that it can handle both structured and ad-hoc parts of business processes?
A lot of fundamental questions and reflections which hadn’t arrived at a final conclusion, when CMMN was released in 2014.
What is CMMN Adding to Business Process Management?
Let’s take the example of a travel insurance claim process, as it typically exists within most insurance companies.
Claims handling is a typical example of a hybrid business process. On the one hand there are highly predictable and perfectly chronological parts. On the other hand unpredictable events disturbing the predefined sequence can pop up during the entire case lifecycle. Moreover the specific situation of a particular claim may require some additional user tasks which are not part of the predefined flow.
A typical claims process consists of 5 subprocesses, or at least, that is how you would model it in BPMN:
Check the claim eligibility.
Analyse the claim liability and circumstances.
Determine the claim compensation.
Deliver the claim compensation to the customer.
Close the claim case.
As said, in BPMN this would at the highest process level result in a flow consisting of 5 subprocesses. Once the first subprocess is ended, the second will be started, and so on.
Every subprocess leads to an important milestone or decision. In an ideal situation all of the input data or information for all of the decisions is available from the start and won’t change during the course of the claim handling. But of course, that is not the reality in the majority of the cases.
So, whatever information is coming in during the handling of the claim -which can by the way take several weeks- might have an impact on earlier decisions. In our insurance case example it is not uncommon that during the third subprocess (Determine the Claim Compensation), an eligibility issue pops up meaning that the Eligibility decision of the first subprocess (Check Claim Eligibility) needs to be revisited.
Foreseeing the handling of such an unpredictable event at whatever point in time during the execution of a business process leads to a quite complex or even quite impossible modeling challenge in BPMN.
Everything is possible of course, but it at least makes the BPMN process model needlessly complex.
In CMMN on the contrary that type of modeling challenge can easily be solved without complicating the model itself.
In the CMMN model below the 5 subprocesses above are modelled as stages (the rectangles with chopped off corners).
In BPMN a subprocess or a task is automatically triggered whenever a previous subprocess or task is finished.
In CMMN a stage or task is triggered whenever a relevant event occurs (e.g. the update of a certain data element). So, a stage or task can be configured to listen to whatever update of a particular input data element or whatever occurence of other relevant information. And as soon as such an event occurs, the stage or task can take appropriate action.
In our example above, that means that, whenever information that could shed another light on a preliminary eligibility decision, occurs, it will automatically make sure that the activities to revisit that decision are launched.
This avoids a lot of loopbacks which could turn a process model into an inextricable pile of spaghetti.
However, whenever a fully predefined set of tasks is to be executed in a chronological sequence, a CMMN task can be configured as a process task, which means it triggers a BPMN process.
This way CMMN and BPMN together can cope with a more complete process handling. In such a hybrid approach, CMMN will always be in the lead, as it can launch all types of tasks, amongst which:
process tasks (BPMN),
user tasks,
case tasks (i.e. subcases),
decision tasks (DMN).
CMMN - More than just process management
While CMMN can play an important role in making business process management more powerful, flexible and effective, CMMN is in the first place about lifecycle.
Adopting a lifecycle-oriented perspective entails recognizing cases as dynamic entities that evolve through different stages and milestones.
The real power of CMMN is that it does not only enable business organisations to handle individual customer requests (e.g. a travel insurance claim) in a state-of-the-art manner. No, it brings along very advanced and powerful ways to coordinate and harmonise customer operations and organisational change activities across business domains, departments and teams, in an end-to-end fashion:
customer relationship management,
customer contract management,
program & project management,
business domain management.
The CMMN model above provides a high-level overview of the end-to-end lifecycle of an insurance contract, referring to subcases, in which one or more business processes will actually organise and handle the individual customer operation activities to be conducted.
And the insurance contract lifecycle can in turn be part of an overall end-to-end customer relationship lifecycle.
This opens a lot of perspectives in achieving opeational excellence within business organisations. Especially because it is not only a documentation, it can easily be implemented using a runtime CMMN engine making sure that the existing white spaces between business units and departments fade away.
Main Benefits of using Cases in CMMN
In summary, CMMN can play a key role in achieving operational excellence.
Its main benefits and added values are:
Flexibility and Adaptability: Cases provide a flexible structure to handle dynamic and unstructured processes, allowing for ad-hoc adjustments and accommodating changing requirements.
Visibility and Transparency: Cases enable a comprehensive view of the entire process or business domain, providing stakeholders with transparency and facilitating informed decision-making.
Collaboration and Coordination beyond Processes: Cases facilitate collaboration and coordination among stakeholders involved in different stages of a business process or the contract/customer lifecycle, ensuring effective communication and seamless handoffs, and avoiding confusion and white spaces.