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.

翻译：业务流程管理（BPM）已被广泛用于发现、建模、分析与优化组织流程。BPM通过预设明确定义起点与终点的分析技术来审视这些流程。然而，并非所有流程都遵循此逻辑，导致其行为无法被BPM分析技术有效捕捉。本文在概念层面探讨这一研究问题。具体而言，我们提出了针对一个或多个实体生命周期流程的活化业务流程概念。我们通过多行业案例论证了生命周期流程的普遍存在性，并阐明其恰当的概念化为建立适配的建模与分析技术奠定了基础。本文提出了针对此类流程的分析需求集，并对生命周期流程与活化过程进行了系统性概念化。