E-business Learning Tool for Online Banking Based on BPM (Business Process Management)

Abstract

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. 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. 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 ebanking, thus generating a generic platform for assimilation of any type of process flow. The system architecture modularizes the entire project in four levels to ensure a clearest logical separation. 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 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. 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: 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.