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.
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.
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.
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:
- activity
- resource
- organization
- product
- service
- supply chain
- cost
- quality
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.
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.
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:
- specification of the enterprise model -- these are the axioms in the ontologies.
- enterprise design expertise -- these are the axioms in the microtheories
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
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
- Enterprise Muse
- Enterprise Model Library
The remaining tools implement the reasoning tasks for advisors.
Analyzing Enterprise Models
- Organization Browser
- Goal Browser
- Model Integrity Checker
- Performance Tracker
- Enterprise Diagnostics
Redesigning Enterprise Models
- Process Playpen
- Benchmarker's Assistant
- Implementation Roadmap
- Activity-based Costing
- Agility and Process Integration
- ISO 9000 Quality Compliance
- Time-based Competition
The BPR Tool Repository must be used to evaluate existing tools.

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