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Unraveling the Never-Ending Story of Lifecycles and Vitalizing Processes

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Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing. EDOC 2024 Workshops (EDOC 2024)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing ((LNBIP,volume 537))

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Abstract

Business process management (BPM) has been widely used to discover, model, analyze, and optimize organizational processes. BPM looks at these processes with analysis techniques that assume a clearly defined start and end. However, not all processes adhere to this logic, with the consequence that their behavior cannot be appropriately captured by BPM analysis techniques. This paper addresses this research problem at a conceptual level. More specifically, we introduce the notion of vitalizing business processes that target the lifecycle process of one or more entities. We show the existence of lifecycle processes in many industries and that their appropriate conceptualizations pave the way for the definition of suitable modeling and analysis techniques. This paper provides a set of requirements for their analysis, and a conceptualization of lifecycle and vitalizing processes.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF), grant number 16DII133 (Weizenbaum-Institute). We thank Julian Theis for fruitful discussions about lifecycle processes in industrial settings.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Weizenbaum Institute for the Networked Society, Berlin, Germany

    Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen & Jan Mendling

  2. Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen, Saimir Bala & Jan Mendling

  3. Technical University of Munich, Heilbronn, Germany

    Luise Pufahl

  4. Wirtschaftsuniversität Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Jan Mendling

Authors
  1. Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen
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  2. Saimir Bala
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  3. Luise Pufahl
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  4. Jan Mendling
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Stephan A. Fahrenkrog-Petersen or Saimir Bala .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Monika Kaczmarek-Heß

  2. Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences, Mönchengladbach, Germany

    Kristina Rosenthal

  3. Czech Technical University in Prague, Prague, Czech Republic

    Marek Suchánek

  4. Universidade de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Miguel Mira Da Silva

  5. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Henderik A. Proper

  6. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Marianne Schnellmann

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Fahrenkrog-Petersen, S.A., Bala, S., Pufahl, L., Mendling, J. (2025). Unraveling the Never-Ending Story of Lifecycles and Vitalizing Processes. In: Kaczmarek-Heß, M., Rosenthal, K., Suchánek, M., Da Silva, M.M., Proper, H.A., Schnellmann, M. (eds) Enterprise Design, Operations, and Computing. EDOC 2024 Workshops . EDOC 2024. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 537. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-79059-1_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-79059-1_5

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