How Close to Reality is the „as-is” Business Process Simulation Model?

Abstract

Background and Purpose: Business process simulation (BPS) model is based on real-life data form sources like databases, observations and interviews. It acts as "as-is" business scenario can used for reengineering. The main challenge is to gather relevant data and to develop simulation model. Research aims to elaborate BPS model and to systematically assess how close to reality it is. Design/Methodology/Approach: The research has been performed in Polish telecommunications company. Authors investigate technical process of expanding cellular network. After elaborating "as-is" model, authors use ADONIS simulation tool to run a series simulations and confront simulation results with actual historical events. After this, assessment whether computer simulation model can precisely map real-life business process -and consequently act as credible basis for process improvement -is made. Results: The simulation model has been constructed with data from the WfMS database, observations, staff knowledge and their experience. Fully equipped simulation model is found to allow reconstructing the historical execution of business activity with low margin for error. Some limitation were identified and discussed. Conclusion: BPS is not a popular approach for process reengineering and improvement yet. Data collection issues for BPS that require adopting process mining techniques and additional information sources are among the reasons for that. In our study, computer simulation outputs are compatible with historical events. Hence the model reflects the business reality and can be taken as a reference model while redesigning the process.

Process Cost Management of Alzheimer’s Disease

“…Business process simulation is mostly concerned with simulating hard processes. The authors assumed that all the information was available, and the simulation was performed first at the As-Is level (with the current data) of the process, then changes were made to the To-Be (future status analysis), and the assumption was that there were no changes in the process [72][73][74][75]. Other relevant studies utilized the Markov model for a simulation of the patient's progress through several stages, which took into account the stage of the disease and differentiated between patients treated at home and institutionalized patients.…”

The Need for Interactive Data-Driven Process Simulation in Healthcare: A Case Study

“…However, the resource perspective was not included, assuming no resource constraints [16]. Gawin and Marcinkowski [13] provided support for activity durations, control-flow, resources, gateway routing logic, resource schedules, and inter-arrival times. However, the latter two were not automatically derived from data and had to be defined by domain experts [13].…”

“…Gawin and Marcinkowski [13] provided support for activity durations, control-flow, resources, gateway routing logic, resource schedules, and inter-arrival times. However, the latter two were not automatically derived from data and had to be defined by domain experts [13]. ClearPath [15] provides a methodology for discovering and simulating Care Pathways (CPs).…”

Business Process Simulation on Procedural Graphical Process Models

“…Moreover, idiosyncratic extensions to process modeling languages have been proposed, typically in combination with proprietary simulation tool support (cf. Gawin and Marcinkowski 2015;Laue and Mu ¨ller 2016;Pufahl et al 2018).…”