Business Process Simulation & Improvement

Business process reengineering usually involves modeling of the existing and the changed process. Assessing model quality is therefore an important issue in this context as shown in the previous section and respective action has to be taken. But quality is also imperative when it comes to the process itself. How can we determine if the changes that we suggest to make in the process really are for the better? In general it is not an option to try these changes in the real organization as that would be costly and might affect or even jeopardize the business.

Simulation is an established and proven tool under such circumstances because it allows us to monitor important parameters of the process in a “laboratory” environment without having to implement it. But most business process models are not suitable for simulation. Some of them provide enough formality to animate them, i.e. we can visualize their behavior, but none of them allows for a full-blown simulation that gives insight into real-life process parameters such as processing times, waiting times, throughput, etc. These are the parameters that are necessary to assess whether the business process has really been improved. And, more than that, they can also help us to identify potential improvements we might have overlooked.

To make use of the powerful tool of simulation we need a simulation model, a very detailed model of the business process. Usually such a model is developed from scratch which involves a considerable amount of development work. I claim that the amount of work can be reduced if we make use of a language action-oriented model of the business process. Such a model can be the result of a business process analysis, an activity that is often performed in the early stages of a reengineering project. In [R05b, R05c] I show how a simulation model can be derived from such a business process model.

[R05b]   Rittgen, Peter: Deriving Simulation Models from Business Process Models, INFOCOMP Journal, 4 (2005) 3, pp. 23-31

[R05c]    Rittgen, Peter: Language Action-Based Simulation of Business Processes, in: Goldkuhl, Göran; Lind, Mikael and Haraldson, Sandra:  Proceedings of the 10th Anniversary International Working Conference on the Language-Action Perspective on Communication Modelling, Kiruna, Lapland, Sweden, June 19-20, 2005, pp. 119-130