An Architecture for Business Process Reengineering

Enterprise Integration Laboratory
Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario M5S 3G9
tel: 416-978-6347 fax: 416-971-2479
email: gruninger@ie.utoronto.ca

Table of Contents

This paper outlines the strategic goals, objectives, directions and priorities of the Ente rprise Integration Laboratory for business process reengineering.

1.0 Motivation

Business process re-engineering is very much in the "guild" mold of application; management consultants are the "masters" and they impart their knowledge through "apprenticeship" to other consultants. The application of BPR h as been heuristic - in some cases, it works, in other cases it fails. The knowledge of business process re-engineering has yet to be formalized and reduced to engineering practice. We want to characterize when reengineering works and why it fails in some cases.

Enterprise modelling is an essential step in defining the tasks and functionality of the various components of an enterprise. The goal is to create generic, reusable representations of enterprise knowledge that can be applied across a variety of enterpris es.

In addition to enterprise modelling, the goal of EIL is to provide a software environment that allows the exploration of alternative enterprise models spanning organization structure and behaviour. This environment allows for the exploration of a variety of enterprise designs. The process of exploration is one of design, analysis and re-design, where the system not only provides a comparative analysis of enterprise design alternatives, but can also provide guidance to the designer.

2.0 EIL Deliverables

2.1 Architecture and Framework for BPR

We use the BPR framework to determine what kinds of tools we need to support the BPR framework, as well as to characterize the analysis capabilities required of these tools at different stages in the framework.

2.2 Integrated Ontologies

The TOVE ontologies have the following characteristics: 1) provides a shared terminology for the enterprise that every application can jointly understand and use, 2) defines the meaning (semantics) of each term in a precise and as unambiguous manner as po ssible using First Order Logic, 3) implements the semantics in a set of Prolog axioms that enable TOVE to automatically deduce the answer to many "common sense" questions about the enterprise, and 4) defines a symbology for depicting a term or t he concept constructed thereof in a graphical context.

The TOVE ontologies constitute an integrated enterprise model, providing support for more powerful reasoning in problems that require the interaction of the following ontologies:

For example, we can examine the impact (in terms of cost and quality) of alternative organization structures on activities in the supply chain that manufacture some components of a product.

2.3 Ontology Libraries

In addition to a set of integrated ontologies, EIL provides ontology libraries to model enterprises in different domains. This framework provides a characterization of classes of enterprises by sets of assumptions over their processes, goals, and organiz ation constraints.

2.4 Advisors and Tools for BPR

This software environment is comprised of BPR tools and enterprise engineering advisors.

The distinction between tools and advisors is based on the use of knowledge in the analysis tasks performed by a tool.

Any tool that performs some analysis tasks can be considered to be a problem solving shell which incorporates knowledge about different domains and enterprise design perspectives in the form of axioms.

The knowledge required to characterize the best enterprise along each design perspective, such as cost, quality, or time, is formalized using different sets of axioms in the microtheories. For example, the microtheories for time-based competition charact erize the enterprise models with minimum cycle time.

The reasoning task performed by a tool may be deduction, explanation, or consistency checking. The algorithms for these tasks are developed independently of the content of the axioms with which we are reasoning. This allows a modular approach to the desig n and analysis of enterprise models.

The axioms that are used in a tool fall into two categories:

The advisors encapsulate the above sets of axioms required to reason about alternative enterprise designs. Tools incorporate advisors to analyze an enterprise design from the corresponding enterprise design perspective. For example, the Performance Trac ker tool would incorporate axioms from the ABC advisor when evaluating costs associated with an enterprise model and it would incorporate axioms from the Time-based Competition advisor when evaluating cycle time and productivity.

Competency questions and deductive queries

2.4.1 EIL Tool Suite

The following tools to be developed within EIL fall into two classes. The first set of tools provide an infrastructure for enterprise modelling.

Constructing Enterprise Models

The remaining tools implement the reasoning tasks for advisors.

Analyzing Enterprise Models

Redesigning Enterprise Models

2.4.2 Enterprise Engineering Advisors

2.5 Evaluation of BPR Tools

The BPR Tool Repository must be used to evaluate existing tools.

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