Incorporating the Effects of Organizational Structure into Business Process Simulation

Abstract

Today’s organizations change or redesign business processes and/or organizational structures, more frequently than ever before, to innovate and adapt to the rapidly changing environment. Business process simulation attempts to provide more effective prediction of the effects of process and organizational redesign. Most existing approaches consider only business processes, however, without considering organizational structures that can significantly affect business process performance. This paper introduces an approach to incorporating the effects of organizational structure into business process simulation. First, the paper identifies various factors for designing organizational structures that can affect business process performance. Then, it proposes a simulation model that combines business processes and organizational structures to show how the above factors can be incorporated into a simulation model. The proposed approach will enable more precise prediction of the changes caused by process and organizational redesign.