Dynamic business process modelling (BPM) for business process change

The high failure rates of many business process change deployments are attributed to the inability to predict the outcome of the exercise without actually implementing the change in the physical environment. This restriction could be a result of over 80% of business process change projects adopting a static modelling technique in order to model their business processes. Static modelling enables the display of activities and the flow of information. However, physical aspects of a process, such as the movement of an object through the process, cannot be replicated. A technique that is thought to overcome this problem is dynamic Business Process Modelling (BPM). As the term suggests dynamic modelling facilitates the representation of the dynamic aspects of a business process including resources and the movement of people and objects. The aim of this paper is to investigate the use of dynamic modelling, in comparison to static modelling, for the purpose of business process change. This is achieved by the using both static modelling and dynamic modelling to represent the change procedure of a process from the Helpdesk of a large multi-national company. The results achieved using both techniques are compared. © 2001, UK Simulation Society. All rights reserved.