Abstract:
The design of business processes often ignores detailed consideration of service cost.
With competitive market pressure, this has become a key factor for the service sector.
Along with cost, customer satisfaction is a driving force in all organisations these days.
In an increasingly competitive marketplace, due to the current emphasis on service
throughout the whole economy, businesses must fight to attract and retain their
customers. The response time for modification, or reengineering, of existing processes
and the creation of new processes is important in the service sector – this is usually
required in a short period of time in order to respond to market and/or customer
demand. Thus, there is a requirement for the automation of business process
reengineering in order to facilitate this and to minimise response time.
In order to address the above, the research carried out during this project involved the
design and development of a framework to integrate an activity based cost estimating
approach which takes into account probability of resource usage in variable processes,
with an automated business process reengineering technique which incorporates an
evolutionary computing (genetic algorithms) based optimisation module. Along with
this, a novel methodology for detecting risk of negative impact on levels of customer
satisfaction without the availability of customer related data has also been developed
and integrated with the reengineering technique - cost reduction being the primary
objective, but not at the expense of customer satisfaction. The overall aim is to automate
the reengineering of business processes to as great an extent as possible in order to save
potentially considerable human time and effort. The development of the automated
framework also included the creation of a numeric process representation mechanism in
order to enable quantitative analysis of complex business processes.
The framework is implemented within a prototype software platform for expert
validation.