Synergia - Comprehensive Tool Support for Configurable Process Models

Process configuration deals with the problem of managing families of business process models, i.e. business process models that are similar to one another in many ways, yet differ in some other ways from one organization or industry to another. For example this problem arises in the context of multinational companies that need to localize their business processes to different legislations or quality requirements. It also manifests itself in the context of acquisition projects, where a company needs to merge their own processes with the ones of the acquired organization. Re-designing business process models every time from scratch is often not a viable option, due the high costs involved. Process configuration proposes to address this problem by merging similar “bestpractice” process models in a single configurable process model, where variation points are explicitly captured. Business analysts can then configure this model to their needs by choosing the proper process variant for each variation point and removing those variants (i.e. process fragments) that are irrelevant. This paper presents Synergia, the first toolset providing comprehensive support for configurable process models. The approach underpinning Synergia is outlined in Section 2. Next, the toolset’s main features are described in Section 3 while its maturity is discussed in Section 4. An outlook to future developments concludes the paper.