Modelling in the re-engineering process

• Authors: Aphrodite Tsalgatidou;Stefan Junginger
• Venue: ACM SIGOIS Bulletin - Special issue: business process reengineering
• Year: 1995

Terms like Business Process Re-engineering and BusinessRe-engineering have their origins in the publications of Hammer(Hammer, 199 0) and Davenport (Davenport & Short, 1990). As itis stated in (Soles, 1994), one of the key ideas of Re-engineeringis to 'focus analysis on business processes across the firm withcustomer satisfication in view'. We define a business process as'a set of logical ly interrelated activities within anorganisation the execution of which contributes in the achievementof the business objectives'.In Re-engineering the analysis of business processes is combinedwith advanced information systems technology (IT). In this way, ITacts as an enabler for realizing new products which satisfy theusers' needs along the lines of business process analysis results.W orkflow Management Systems are an example of systems that can beused as tools for implementing and executing business processes(White & Fischer, 1914).Re-engineering can start in an enterprise only if theenterprise's strategic management has realised that there is a needfor change and for reformulation of the enterprise's vision.Usually the enterprise's strategic management selects the businessprocess(es) that should be re-engineered. Re-engineeringcorresponds to the second process within the Business ProcessManagement Systems (BPMS) - Framework (Karagiannis, 1994, Sep.)which considers all the activities, that have be executed whiledealing with business processes, as processes themselves. TheRe-engineering Process may be seen as consisting of a number ofsubprocesses (Karagiannis, 1994, May; Soles, 1994). Here, the Re-engineering Process is viewed as consisting of four mainsubprocesses (see Fig. 1, below):• Goal Definition, where the re-engineering goals aredefined.• Information Acquisition, where information necessaryfor business process modelling, (like activities, people, roles,control etc.) as well as information needed for the Re-engineeringProcess (like cost, time, specific laws etc.) is collected.• Modelling which deals with the modelling of the (new)business process.• Evaluation which is concerned with the evaluation ofthe business process model against the re-engineering goals.Depending on the evaluation results, the subprocesses ofInformation Acquisition, Modelling andEvaluation may be iteratively executed until allthe re-engineering goals (defined during the GoalDefinition subprocess), have been reached.These four subprocesses may be differently 'instantiated',depending on the chosen methodology. For example, Hammer says thatre-engineering teams should try to think as companies are startinganew. This means that, the execution of the In formationAcquisition sub process depends on whether it is executedwithin a 'radical re-engineering approach' (Hammer &Champy, 1993) or within an 'increment al re-engineering approach'(Davenport, 1993). Furthermore, a number of different techniquesmay be used for each of these subprocesses. For example, animation,simulation or statistical analysis are some of the techniques thatmay be used for Evaluation. The use of aspecific technique is also a characteristic of the chosenmethodology.The focus of this paper is on the third subprocess of theRe-engineering Process, i.e. on Modelling. Thissubprocess is the core of the Re-engineering Process as the goalsof a re-engineering project can only be reached if the businessprocess is analysed properly and afterwards implemented accordingto the constructed business process model. A general description ofModelling is given in section 2. As it can beseen in Fig. 2, Modelling may be viewed asconsisting of three tasks, namely: Choose ModellingPhilosophy, Choose a Modelling Formalism andApply Formalism to the selected BusinessProcess.In section 2 a brief description of the business process objectsto be modelled is given and a number of requirements to besatisfied by business process modelling formalisms is set. Thefirst modelling task is analysed in section 3. Business processmodelling approaches are classified under two modeling paradigms,namely task-oriented paradigm and business policy-orientedparadigm. The other two modelling tasks are analysed in section 4by describing and comparing two representative approaches of thetwo modelling paradigms which are applied to the same example.Finally, section 5 draws some conclusions from this work andfocusses on issues which still remain open in this area and givessome suggestions for further work.