Empirical Business Models

Change projects try to optimize business processes and structures and seek to make better use of the resources across the enterprise. In these change projects, business process models are commonly applied to represent both the current and future situation. These models have the ability to show how resources like employees, data, and departments are related to business operations. However, existing business process models lack the abilities both to show load distribution through process flows and to treat capabilities and performance of resources individually. We will in this paper describe how identifiers of past business performance can be incorporated into business models, thus providing a communicative source of information where many potential improvements can be grasped instantly. The approach is supported by an application called Enterprise Visualization Suite that analyzes transactional data from SAP R/3 and extract empirical models of the business flow.