Intelligent Software Support for Business Process Change

Abstract

In recent years, many organisations have found enterprise modelling, and particularly business process modelling, to be an effective tool for managing organisational change - both for developing an understanding of the organisation as it currently exists and for planning change in the organisation. The process models developed, however, tend to be used only for reference during business operations and the reengineering activity, rather than as a resource which can be actively used to support the day-to-day execution of the organisation's processes. While workflow systems do use process models in this way, current systems can only handle simple, predictable processes, not the dynamically changing, complex and unpredictable processes for which many organisations require support. The TBPM project extends the application scope of current workflow systems to more complex and flexible business processes by incorporating into the software system knowledge about the processes and their organisational context, in the form of enterprise models. Used in conjunction with a management approach which permits the specification, planing, and enactment of processes to be interleaved, the models provide the basis for TBPM's adaptive workflow support for complex business processes. The TBPM project is a collaborative project between AIAI, the University of Edinburgh and the Computer Science Department at Loughborough University. ICI and Unilever are industrial partners on the project, providing real business requirements and an application scenario from the chemical process industries. This scenario, taken from the area of new product development, illustrates the mechanisms and benefits of the approach adopted.