A Methodology for Integrating Business Process and Simulation for Business Process Redesign

IDEF0 is the IEEE standard for functional enterprise modeling and has been used for business process modeling or process mapping in US and Europe. But it does not reflect the potential benefits of modeling and simulation of the dynamic aspects of an enterprise or a system. On the other hand, simulation tools concentrate mostly on the simulation of material flows and are difficult to include information flows and control flows. Additionally, the simulation models that include elements such as queues, event generators and process nodes is a visual interactive representation for the model builder, but is inconvenient for the domain expert. In an attempt to fill that void, we provide an integration of business process and simulation models in this paper. An enhancement of the IDEF0, called parameterized IDEF0, is proposed and its conversion mechanism to network simulation model is developed. Using this methodology, business process models for alternative systems can be evaluated and compared through simulation on time, cost, and quality metrics. As an application of the proposed methodology, economic evaluation of EDI (Electronic Data Interchange) for time-based BPR (Business Process Redesign) is demonstrated. In addition to BPR, the developed methodology may be further integrated with ABC (Activity Based Costing), TQM (Total Quality Management), and economic evaluation of information systems.