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STREAMLINING BUSINESS PROCESSES IN ACADEMIA BY BUILDING AND

MANIPULATING A BUSINESS RULES REPOSITORY

Conference Paper · April 2015

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 Proceedings of the IE 2015 International Conference
www.conferenceie.ase.ro

STREAMLINING BUSINESS PROCESSES IN ACADEMIA BY

BUILDING AND MANIPULATING A BUSINESS RULES
REPOSITORY

Alexandra Maria Ioana FLOREA

Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest
alexandra.florea@ie.ase.ro
Ana-Ramona BOLOGA
Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest
ramona.bologa@ie.ase.ro
Vlad DIACONIȚA
Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest
vlad.diaconita@ie.ase.ro
Razvan BOLOGA
Academy of Economic Studies, Bucharest
razvan.bologa@ie.ase.ro

Abstract. It is evident the existing trend in recent years to regard the university as a trader
on the market that works and is managed like a business. In this context, more and more
universities are interested to increase the efficiency of business processes and invest in the
development of advanced software solutions.
Given these issues, we will present a research proposal which suggest an approach based on
business rules to streamline the coordination and execution of business processes within a
university. From a scientific perspective, the project aims to address the area of researches
based on business rules in academia, which has not been addressed so far. It aims to develop
and implement a technique for identifying and formalizing business rules in academia and to
build a business rules repository that is constantly queried/viewed and updated as changes
occur to regulations regarding business processes or to restrictions on structures, activities
and informational flows inside the university. The business processes model and the rules
repository will be developed for the specific case of the Bucharest University of Economic
Studies and in the next stage it will be generalized for other Romanian public institutions.

Keywords: business processes, business rules, business rules repository, university

management
JEL classification: I23, L86, O33

1. Introduction
Modern universities are complex organizations that, in terms of implemented information
systems present a significant number of challenges. Generally speaking, if we analyze
academics in terms of information, we can identify a set of subsystems with independent
activities, but which develop instead a more or less intense information exchange with other
subsystems, generating in this way inevitable interdepencies.
For these subsystems of activities, universities implement a set of software applications that
automate all or part of the business processes involved. The technical infrastructure of
universities is usually made up of a mosaic of applications developed using different
technologies and, in order to ensure trouble-free execution of business flows there is
necessary the process integration in the systems they are contained in. This integration can be
 Proceedings of the IE 2015 International Conference
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achieved in various ways; the most important thing is the existence of an overall view of the
functioning of the university and its interactions with its partners, the objectives pursued and
the rules governing them.
In this article we present an approach based on business rules to streamline the coordination
and execution of business processes from the Bucharest University of Economic Studies.

2. Business rules in academic process modeling

Business rules represent some of the most important key documented knowledge within an
organization. They allow the separation of business logic from processes and operational
applications, allowing specification of business knowledge in a way that is easy to understand
but can be executed automatically by automated rules engine.
By researching the current literature we found that there are no similar, business rules-based
modeling approaches in academia, to date. Current efforts in this field are directed toward the
development of an industrial standard for markup languages to specify business rules on all
levels of the models of the Model Driven Architecture (MDA) [1] such as SBVR (Semantics
of Business Vocabulary and Business Rules Specification) [2] or PRR (Production Rule
Representation) [19]. There were also identified a number of researches on the definition of a
transformation model between different rules specification languages such as [3]. This project
will make an analysis of the current standards and which ones are applicable in the specific
case of a university
Although current approaches existing in the industry can be partially used with the necessary
adaptations, the difficulty lies in formalizing the large number of tacit or implicit knowledge
and the existence of a high degree of information fragmentation. Also, the specific
universities business processes mentioned above show particular aspects, involving increased
attention in their management.
The development of the business processes model of a university comes to offer a collection
of business processes documented in a standardized fashion, to highlightg the relationships
between business processes and to ensure quality in their execution by observing a set of
rules. Existing business models can be applied to a part of the academic process, but there are
business processes that are specific to higher education institutions, such as admission,
research grants management, cycle management studies.

3. University business process model

The starting point in the identification of business rules will be to build the business
processes model across multiple levels of detail, because only in this way we can capture all
models of behavior, imposed restrictions, interactions, existing interdependencies between
processes and how they call common business rules.
The literature in the field of modeling business processes is very rich especially for the area
dedicated to companies; there are even reference models that have been highly used such as
the SCOR model [4], the Y-CIM model [5], the template created by SAP [6] or the ITIL
model (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) [7]. Implementations have emerged
in recent years focused on processes at university level, and there have even been proposed
reference models based on business processes, such as the one developed by Svensson and
Hvolby in 2012 [8], models that can be used as starting point in developing a process-
oriented solutions specific to the Romanian universities environment while taking into
account different aspects in the organization and development of processes and implicitly in
how different business rules are applied.
An important problem of the business rules approach in academia is the way of
communication, the interaction with all the software applications used within the university.
 Proceedings of the IE 2015 International Conference
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The process model will identify precisely where and when to apply certain business rules, but
for maintaining the repository a management interface will be developed and a security
policy will be defined to restrict access and changing of information rights and to identify
those responsible for keeping the information up to date.
Existing business models can be applied to a part of the academic processes, but there are
business processes that are specific to higher education units such as admission, research
grants management, study lifecycle management.
An example of how a higher education business process has unique activities which are not
matched with regular activities within existing business processes is detailed in figure 1. In
this figure the main activities that form the students ‘evaluation process can be observed.

Figure 1: Students’ evaluation process

For this particular process we can identify a number of rules that are in place but aren’t
necessarily documented in a controlled manner.
 The license commission’s president must be either a full professor or an associate
professor.
 The members of the license commission must be at least lecturers who obtained their
PhDs.
 Enrolment in the 2nd year can be done if at least 15 credits were obtained.
 Enrolment in the 3rd year can be done if at least 60 credits were obtained, from which at
least 15 from the 2nd year of study.
 Enrolment for the license exam must be done at least 8 months prior to the exam date.
 The results of the exams must be communicated to the students the next day for oral exam
and in 4 working days for written exams.
 Enrolment in the 3rd supplemental year can be done only with tax and for a maximum of
three consecutive times.
 Proceedings of the IE 2015 International Conference
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These are just a few examples of how an academic business process is governed by rules and
as such they must be properly documented, stored and managed through a repository.

4. Rules repository
The overall objective of the research is to build and handle a repository of business rules that
govern business processes in a university. This repository is intended to be an exhaustive
classification that contains and allows the management of all the business rules that operate in
a university, including both academic and economic processes. Also this repository must be
designed so that it could be used in further research as a core element of a rules engine,
through which business rules will be implemented. To attain this objective we will go
through a series of specific objectives
O1: Designing the conceptual model of business processes at a university.
In investigating the business processes we follow the indications of the Lean methodology
and in order to build the business processes model we use the notations provided by Business
Process Model and Notation version 2.0, the latest version standardized by the Object
Management Group (OMG), thus building models based on modern approaches to data
visualization. As one of the original scientific contribution, note that when modeling the
business rules, we seek to define a technique for identifying and formalizing business rules in
academia.
O2: Developing a conceputal model of business rules that govern the previously modeled
processes.
At the design stage we keep in mind that the rules stored in the warehouse must be: relevant,
atomic, precise, declarative, reliable, authentic, unique, consistent. The deposit will be
designed so as to store not only rules and their characteristics but also the information
captured in the rules model regarding the associations between rules and processes. Also we
must take into consideration to design the necessary characteristics in order to allow the
storage of historical versions of the sets of rules.
O3: Creating a prototype that implements the rules repository and a management interface.
The advantages of implementing a centralized repository of business rules in a university are
numerous. First a much improved maintenance can be obtained in the idea that the pace of
change for business rules is different from the business process change pace and changes will
be made unitary and centralized. There is a separation of business rules from business
processes implementation. Analysis and design activities of the business processes model that
precedes the development of the rules repository allow a clear identification of the areas of
responsibility and possible redundancies that might occurred in information flows. Also, the
flexibility of the consultation, updating and visibility of the identified set of rules should be
much improved.
The risks identified regarding the proposed models and prototype development include
among others: cumbersome analysis of the processes, due to extremely numerous activities,
building an incomplete business rules model because there are many informal, unspecified
rules, the occurrence of delays of planned activities

5. Conclusions
So far there have been very few attempts made by research groups or by software vendors to
provide models and solutions that address all the activities in a university, describing from
one end to another the academic business processes
Moreover, if the scope of academic processes has been however addressed in other
investigations, there are no similar approaches based on modeling of business rules with
application in academia. So far it has not been built any business rules engine or any business
 Proceedings of the IE 2015 International Conference
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rules repository for the rules that govern academic work processes. Although a good
knowledge and understanding of the rules governing academic processes is essential for the
smooth running of specific activities, in academia it exits an extremely large number of such
rules (hundreds) and they are both formal and informal and therefore difficult to understand
fully, so far there has been no attempt to manage them with a rules repository.
In this context, we propose a research which has a high degree of originality and innovation
addressing a topic that has not been previously studied respectively to develop and implement
a technique for identifying and formalizing business rules in academia and to build a business
rules repository that is constantly queried/viewed and updated as changes occur to regulations
regarding business processes or to restrictions on structures, activities and informational
flows inside the university.

References

[1] Object Management Group, MDA Guide version 1.0.1, june 2003,
http://staffwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk/people/A.Simons/remodel/papers/MDAGuide101Jun03.pdf
[2] Object Management Group, Production Rule Representation version 1.0 (PRR) . Request
for Proposal, decembrie 2009, http://www.omg.org/spec/PRR/1.0/PDF/
[3] M.H. Linehan, “Semantics in model-driven business design”, IBM T.J. Watson Research
Center, 2006, http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-207/paper08.pdf,
[4] SCOR Model, http://www.supplychainopz.com/2011/01/scor-model-for-supply-chain-
improvement.html ,
[5] A.W. Scheer, W. Jost, Ö. Güngöz, “A Reference Model for Industrial Enterprises”,
chapter 8 in “Reference Modeling for Business Systems Analysis”, IGI Global, 2007, p. 167-
181;
[6] B. F. Dongen, M.H. Jansen-Vullers, H.M.W.Verbik, Verification of the SAP reference
models using EPC reduction, state-space analysis, and invariants, Computers in industry, vol
58, issue 6, august 2007, p. 579-601;
[7] https://www.axelos.com/itil;
[8] C. Svensson, H.H. Hvolby, “Establishing a business process reference model for
Universities”, Procedia Technology nr 5, 2012, p. 635-642;

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