A decision support system for business process planning

In application and theory, great importance is attached to the optimisation of business processes, mostly without explaining into detail the criteria and the alternatives considered for an optimisation. Especially, quantitative criteria can be valuable to evaluate improvements of business processes, then quantitative methods of operations research are of special importance. Many problems of business processes have similarities to problems in the context of project management or production process planning which have already been solved successfully. Particularly simulation-based approaches have been proven to be appropriate in supporting decision making with respect to complex dynamic systems with uncertain data as is the optimisation of business processes. In the following, a generally applicable, object-oriented, simulation-based decision support system GEPSIS is introduced which is specifically developed for the improvement of business processes. The objects are designed in such a way that they are sufficient to model a great variety of different business processes. The pictorial representation assists in analysing the static structure of the process, the simulation system allows the quantitative evaluation of the dynamic behaviour. A case study shows its advantages. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.