GRADE SIMULATION AND EVALUATION OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

SIMULATION AND EVALUATION OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

To justify your decision-making in Business Process Reengineering, you should want to

find possible process botlenecks
analyze the resource allocation and performer utilization
validate the dynamic behaviour of proposed solutions
compare different reengineering solutions quantively

Support for making these decisions may be found using
GRADE Simulator
which supports

dynamic simulation of business processes
business process animation
step-by-step behaviour tracing
automatic simulation statistics gathering
reviewing statistics as charts or tables

Simulation steps (shown for Order Processing example):

Enhancement of the business process model with obvious quantitative data

adding timers to external tasks representing workload generators of a business system
specifying duration of tasks, event transfer times, etc.
specifying branch probabilities in decision tasks

specifying availability hours of performers

Checking the syntactical correctness of a model (via GRADE Syntax Analyzer)

Setting simulation options

simulation session length
breakpoints and single-stepping features
values to be watched dynamically
selecting statistics items to be gathered automatically
etc.

Animation of the model (to understand its dynamics in general)

Running the model in various modes and observing its dynamics in depth

Reviewing the automatically gathered statistics on

tasks dynamics, duration and cost
event queueing and delays
performer utilization
etc.

as charts

as tables

Evaluation of the simulation results - the guide to reengineering decisions
The very long queue of event Customer_Credit_to_be_reviewed at task Vetting_Process shows that order processing must be reorganized:

either the Vice_President_Sales has to perform vetting several times per week
or the vetting might be better supported by an Information System to reduce delays

These suggestions could not so easy be deduced from just viewing the business process.

	Enhancement of the business process model with obvious quantitative data adding timers to external tasks representing workload generators of a business system specifying duration of tasks, event transfer times, etc. specifying branch probabilities in decision tasks specifying availability hours of performers
	Checking the syntactical correctness of a model (via GRADE Syntax Analyzer)
	Setting simulation options simulation session length breakpoints and single-stepping features values to be watched dynamically selecting statistics items to be gathered automatically etc.
	Animation of the model (to understand its dynamics in general)
	Running the model in various modes and observing its dynamics in depth
	Reviewing the automatically gathered statistics on tasks dynamics, duration and cost event queueing and delays performer utilization etc. as charts as tables
	Evaluation of the simulation results - the guide to reengineering decisions The very long queue of event Customer_Credit_to_be_reviewed at task Vetting_Process shows that order processing must be reorganized: either the Vice_President_Sales has to perform vetting several times per week or the vetting might be better supported by an Information System to reduce delays These suggestions could not so easy be deduced from just viewing the business process.