فرایند مهندسی معکوس برای BPR : یک رویکرد مبتنی بر شکل

Firms spend significant efforts identifying and representing their current business processes for business process redesign (BPR) projects. Despite the efforts, due to the lack of proper tools and methodologies, they find it difficult to decide which process to redesign and how. Considering the effort spent in the process analysis phase and limited support in the process redesign phase, we find a need for a better process modeling and redesign method. This article introduces the enterprise process reverse engineering (EPRE) method for analyzing business processes and supporting process redesign tasks. By analyzing common business forms, the method provides designers and users with guidance for process redesign as well as in generating the current process model. Working procedures are described using a sample hospital case and a set of the EPRE prototype screens. For validation purpose, we applied the method to a real BPR project for an advertising agency and report on its outcome.

Relentless changes and competitive pressures in the 1990s have placed new strains on organizations and made business process redesign (BPR) a major subject of attention in academia and industry 12, 19 and 34. BPR is offered as an enabler of organizational transformation, and many organizations have embraced the BPR approach for radical performance improvement. Currently, however, there are two major challenges facing BPR implementations. First, existing business processes have to be understood to enable the BPR team to identify the potential problem areas before creating a new process or redesigning the existing ones 11 and 17. However, it is not a trivial task to identify and represent existing processes in a formal, yet easy to understand, process model [15]. Most BPR methodologies rely on labor intensive approaches for capturing and modeling business processes [4]. We also suffer from the relative lack of documentation compared to the elaborate and structured documentation found in systems development projects. For example, there is seldom a trace of the initial or intermediate process models when the BPR team directly translates its interview results into the new process model or shuffles hundreds of Post-It notes during the analysis phase [5]. Second, support for the process redesign should involve top management buy-in. Many process modeling formalisms originate mostly from the application development perspective 1 and 20, which cannot satisfy the cross-functional, customer-oriented process nature of BPR. Accordingly, methodologies that depend on such process modeling formalisms tend to lack the necessary diagnostic mechanism. Thus, after the current processes are modeled, the question of which process to redesign and how to redesign them still remains unanswered. This explains why most of the BPR literature is restricted to descriptions of the `situation before' and the `situation after', giving very little information on the redesign process itself [16]. The time-consuming efforts spent in the process analysis phase and the limitations of the current methodologies in supporting the redesign phase have motivated us to develop a new method called enterprise process reverse engineering (EPRE). The EPRE method can be used in producing current process models and suggesting process redesign guidelines based on the analysis of business forms. It will facilitate the interaction among BPR managers, IS personnel, and end-users in the analysis and redesign phases of the BPR implementation process.

We have discussed the EPRE method and how it can be used to generate the current enterprise process model and provide process redesign guidelines by analyzing business forms. EPRE consists of three stages: (1) Form analysis; (2) Process model generation; and (3) Process redesign. In the first stage, we identify FSOs for explaining and generating the current process model. Characteristics of each process are reflected in FSOs. In the second stage, we generate the initial process model, using an EPC modeling formalism which supports BPR from the customer's perspective. To the basic model, physical activities and branchings are added. In the last stage, the method provides process redesign guidelines in terms of intra- and inter-FSO redesign opportunities based on the field type information. Intra-FSO redesign opportunities suggest field handling level improvement while inter-FSO redesign opportunities suggest FSO level improvement. Currently, there are several limitations to be overcome in the future research. First, to cover physical activities and branchings, our method needs some level of user interaction to generate the complete process model. Second, process redesign support is restricted to information handling activities. Thus, physical activity or facility related redesign needs to be examined by users. Third, the suggested intra/inter-FSO redesign guidelines do not consider a radical redesign alternative such as removing the entire candidate business process. Rather, it suggests multiple, significant, continuous improvements. Fourth, due to the limitation in identifying field dependencies and relationships, the suggested intra/inter-FSO redesign guidelines lack field level guidelines, such as determining to which FSO the [new] type fields should be moved.