Simulation for intra- and inter-organisational business process modelling

Business process modelling (BPM) is an increasingly emerging field of simulation application. Although it has been practically demonstrated that simulation can be an effective tool for business redesign, there does not exist a comprehensive framework to explain the characteristics of business processes and identify specific requirements for their modelling. Furthermore, hardly any attention has been paid to the modelling of inter-organisational business systems. In this paper, we examine the nature of business processes in the light of modern change management approaches and propose a set of requirements for their modelling. We then concentrate on inter-organisational processes and argue that modelling problems can be much more difficult to overcome when more than one business is involved, mainly due to the multiplicity of decision making levels involved and the subsequent need for multi-level output analysis. Based on an empirical study, we illustrate the practical problems of modelling inter-organisational business systems and suggest desirable characteristics of simulation packages for that purpose. 1