A TOOL FOR OBJECT-ORIENTED MODELING AND ANALYSIS OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

The analysis of business processes requires discussions between differ ent project groups, within the respective project group, and between e xperts and managers in the enterprise and the project members. Therefo re, the modelling of business processes is an essential step in the pr ocess of reorganising enterprises; Reorganisation measures are only po ssible if the existing or planned processes are known. The application of a modelling method should not only support single steps of factory planning. It has to guide and support the whole project. Therefore, i t is necessary to reveal all aspects which are relevant to clarify wea k points, to show potentials for optimisation and their contribution t o the objectives of the enterprise. The article includes industrial ex periments in modelling, workflow analysis, business process reengineer ing and optimisation using Integrated Enterprise Modelling (IEM) and M O(2)GO. IEM gives a transparent representation of planning information and is therefore the basis for discussion between project participant s. To evaluate the variety of planning information and description req uirements it allows different views on one consistent model. The softw are tool MO(2)GO (method of object oriented business process optimisat ion) supports the modelling process based on the IEM method. Different analyses of a given model are available using the MO(2)GO tool like t he generation of ISO9000ff documents, (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.