Support for Business Process Redesign Simulation, Hypermedia and the Web

A critical success factor of business process redesign projects is the extent to which the organisation members themselves both management and staff are actively involved in the redesign project. Assessing alternative process designs with respect to the redesign project goals is an important aspect of such projects. One way to support the assessment of different redesign alternatives is to model these alternatives and subject them to a simulation study. Visualization and animation of the simulation models can provide insight into both the structure and the dynamics of the modelled alternatives. Effectively presented, visualization and animation enhance the involvement of the project members in the assessment and validation of the proposed redesigns. To support communication among all participants in the BPR project, we advocate an integrated presentation of redesign alternatives, visualized simulation experiments and the results of simulation studies in a single active document. In this paper we describe a framework enabling such integrated presentations by allowing the embedding of simulation models and experiments in hypermedia documents. These documents can be presented and executed on the Web. INTRODUCTION Business Process Redesign (BPR) is a method to perform organizational change. Instead of functions and departments it takes business processes as the main subject to redesign the way work is done in a particular organization (Davenport and Short 1990, Davenport 1993, Davenport and Nohria 1994, Hammer 1990, Wastell et al. 1994). Davenport and Short (Davenport and Short 1990) argue that business process redesign should be combined with the capabilities of Information Technology (IT). They show that IT can play two roles in BPR: on the one hand it is an enabler of new process structures. An example would be the use of expert systems to assist bank clerks handling loan requests. On the other hand IT can provide support for the implementation of new process designs. By, for example, simulating the logistic aspects of the redesigned loan request process. By modelling different redesign alternatives and subjecting them to simulation studies the participants in the business process redesign project can assess the alternatives with respect to the redesign project goals. Possible goals include cost reduction, lead time reduction, raising output quality and improving the quality of worklife. Visualization and animation of the simulation models can provide insight into both the structure and dynamics of the modelled alternatives and thus improve decision making. In this paper we advocate an integrated presentation of redesign alternatives, visualized simulation experiments and the results of simulation studies in a single active document. Our approach allows authors to write hypermedia documents with embedded simulation models and experiments. These documents can be viewed on the Internet, or on a company Intranet, using an adapted Internet Web browser. Our system has been implemented using the hush (Eliëns 1995) hypermedia framework developed at the Vrije Universiteit. This framework provides support for multimedia user interfaces, a discrete event simulation library (Bolier and Eliëns 1994) and embedding of applications in the Web (van Doorn and Eliëns 1995, Eliëns et al. 1996). To model business processes we use Logisticsbased Business Modelling (LBM) (Gerrits 1995). The class library BPSIM (Business Process Simulation) facilitates the modelling of business processes using LBM and provides additional support for embedding and running simulations on the Web.