On the Formal Generation of Process Redesigns

Business Process Redesign (BPR) is a process oriented methodology to improve organizations. Although literature on BPR is available in abundance, little concrete support on how to get from as is towards to be is available [12]. We propose the use of an evolutionary redesign approach that is based on BPR best practices to fill this gap. The approach is evolutionary in nature, because local updates are made to an existing process. In this paper we focus on one part of the approach: the generation of redesign alternatives. The first step in the generation of an alternative process is the selection of a process part for redesign. This is followed by a process transformation that determines an alternative for this selected part. Finally, the original process part is replaced by the transformed part resulting in the alternative process. Using Petri net analysis techniques the correctness of such a redesign generation is ensured.