An extended object-oriented modeling method for business process reengineering

Existing Business Process Reengineering (BPR)methodologies rely on modeling approaches. Due to high risks involved in BPR, an organization needs a modeling method that efficiently supports a BPR project. The dissertation has identified a problem in BPR as the lack of an efficient modeling method to support a BPR project under the concept of business process change management. The dissertation proposes a modeling method that utilizes the object-oriented (00) concepts to resolve this problem. A unified research methodology has been used to develop the modeling method.

The dissertation first presents a conceptual model as a theoretical basis on which the proposed modeling method has been developed. While developing the conceptual model, the desired behavior of a BPR modeling method has been determined. Then, three types of knowledge required to produce the behavior have been specified. The first type of knowledge contains kinds of information about a business process that should be captured in a model. The second type of knowledge specifies BPR project activities that should be carried out during a BPR project. The last type of knowledge contains which information about a business process is relevant to each BPR project activity.

The dissertation then presents an extended 00 modeling method that has been developed based on the above conceptual model. The method consists of three main parts: (a) a modeling framework, (b) steps of the modeling method, and (c) information collection templates and information presentation formats.

The proposed method has been compared whh three existing methods to evaluate its comprehensiveness. Three expert committee members have evaluated the four methods for the comparative analysis. The comparative analysis has showed that the proposed method is more comprehensive than the three benchmark methods in four areas: (a) ability to capture more information about a business process, (b) abilhy to support more BPR activhies, (c) ability to support particular BPR activhies in more detail, and (d) ability to provide more information about a business process for a specific analytical action.