E-BUSINESS LEARNING TOOL FOR ONLINE BANKING BASED ON BPM (BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT)
Authors: Radescu Radu , Ardelean Tudor 
Published: February 2023

Business Process Management (BPM) is a discipline involving any combination of modeling, automation, execution, control, measurement and optimization of business flow. BPM should take into account well-defined input data and a single set of output data. BPM platforms include a portal and a user dashboard, providing concept, simulation, rule definition, process execution, integration, monitoring, and optimization functions.

The purpose of this paper is to develop a learning application for the management of banking processes and related databases, which can be used to model the business processes specific to the educational field in finance and banking (e-banking). The application has a general character and can be used to implement any kind of business process in the online learning environment. The model chosen is the relational organizational model, using SQL (Structured Query Language), in which tables have been defined for processes, flows, states, actions, and parameters. Also, two processes are defined within the application, each with a very simple flow, which highlights the concepts of business-case e-learning applied in banking management using BPM tools.

As a motivation, the present work was born out of the need to improve the classical way of learning, by calling on the modeling and execution of e-banking specific processes through BPM. If the complexity of a targeted process increases greatly, it is hard to follow and understand in a learning activity. Thus, the process becomes difficult to modify and adapt to the needs of the beneficiary and when the number of processes involved becomes large any change or development of new functionality can take a long time.

Thus, a structure that uses generic data types defining process-specific entities is a solution to improve how e-business processes are developed in order to make learning easier. In this respect, all processes modeled in an e-banking business learning platform have common structural components, while being differently parameterized according to each process. The technical analysis period is thus reduced, providing a permanent overview of existing processes. The structure designed accordingly is tested through a web application that connects to a database. The developed application is therefore a generic business process management learning tool, exemplified for e-banking processes, assumed by a case study: providing a bank credit to a client.

The aim of the paper is to develop the most efficient software product for e-banking, thus generating a generic platform for assimilation of any type of process flow. The system architecture modularizes the entire project (developed in Visual Studio 2012) in four levels to ensure a clearest logical separation:
- Data Access Level (configured using the Entity Framework with integrated Repository pattern)
- Data Transfer Level (containing the code for each entity in the database);
- Services Level (containing the database query code and maintaining the consistency of all information);
- User Interface Level (containing HTML code combined with Razor syntax and deploying controllers via JavaScript functions included in the forms and dictating the entire system logic).

In addition, three software development templates have been used to make the work of the developer easier and to make the learning product as efficient as possible. The calls to the database - the weakest link in any application in terms of performance - have been minimized to the highest degree. The BPM-based approach together with the related concepts - the graphic process representation (BPD: Business Process Diagrams), the specific modeling standard (BPMN: Business Process Management Notation) and the BPM rule engine - facilitate a transparent and simple management of all e-business specific processes and, at the same time, their easier learning. The visual process representation method (BPMN) is integrated into the web application through the jQuery technology and the BPM rule engine and the rules itself are included in web application controllers.

The business necessity of the present work is customized in the goal of fluidization and dynamism applied in solving any defined process. Thus, in the case study approached, the client applying for a credit goes through the necessary steps in a shorter time, and the cost of analyzing his/her file by the bank is smaller because it automates many portions of the whole process, the involvement of the human factor being importantly reduced. Hence, compared to the conventional version, the corresponding learning process is much simplified and easier to assimilate.

Even though a process has already been automated, it often needs to be calibrated and adapted to better manage the actual situations that occur. The developed learning tool can automate large sections of the e-business process using a decision-making module able to determine the next state, based on the user input parameters and the current status of the e-banking process. This module, integrated using the MVC environment, is customized by setting limits and adding new constraints. After the credit application is completed, its initial status is defined by the flow it belongs to. After the application runs through the entire stream and reaches a terminal status, no actions can be executed on it. However, the client is able to apply to another credit that will go through exactly the same flow pattern.

The resulting learning application for banking-specific e-business processes is able to manage any type of processes and modify these processes through the developed BPMN interface. The original contributions of the paper are as follows:
- Theoretical and practical design of the e-business learning platform database;
- Developing the web application in ASP.NET along with the related front-end technologies: HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript;
- Modeling and implementing as a case study the process of learning the flows of a banking process that highlights the concepts defined by the BPM methodology.

The designed and developed application fulfills its intended purpose: supporting online learning to manage any type of business process with the ability to dynamically modify and adapt these processes through the built-in BPMN interface. The database is well structured, providing measures to support the growth of the platform's complexity, as well as measures to ensure its versatility in using for educational purposes in any e-business processes other than banking.