Living systems theory based modeling for reengineering office operations

There is growing interest among manufacturing companies to reengineer their operations so that they can respond quicker to customer demands. Office op erations often represent a considerable fraction of the total lead time (fr om customer contact to order shipment) and, therefore, offer a significant potential for lead time and cost reduction. This paper presents a Living Sy stems Theory (LST) based modeling methodology for reengineering office oper ations and illustrates its application using a case study. By modeling syst ems in terms of core processes involving information and material flow, and representing systems at different levels of abstraction (namely function l evel, structure level, and artifact level), LST-based models provide a stru ctured representation for generating fundamentally different reengineered s olution alternatives.