Process modeling for BPR: event-process chain approach

Abstract

Most of the recent research on business process redesign(BPR) focused on people or management related issues. Completing a successful BPR project, however, requires a disciplined method to model the target business processes effectively as well. Currently available process modeling methods fail to meet the specific BPR process characteristics (cross-functional, customer-oriented) and the ideal features of a modeling formalism (expressiveness, simplicity) simultaneously. In this paper we introduce a new process modeling method exclusively designed to support BPR from the customer's perspective, based on the concept of event-process chain(EPC). We analyze the EPC model, along with five other methods, over the above criteria to prove its appropriateness for BPR and strength as a powerful and elegant modeling method to three real world BPR projects and suggest its future enhancement directions.