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, a new process modeling method exclusively designed to support BPR from the customer’s perspective, based on the concept of event-process chain (EPC), is introduced. The EPC model is analyzed, along with five other methods, over the above criteria to prove its appropriateness for BPR and its strength as a powerful and elegant modeling formalism. We also report on the application of the EPC modeling method to three real world BPR projects and suggest its future enhancement directions.