Development of database of business processes for SME on the base of quality system.

Karaulova, T. ; Otto, T.

Abstract: This paper addresses a need for modelling methods to support enterprise engineering. Enterprise engineering is the considered and systematic analysis and design of the enterprise through the business processes, which it employs to realize business goals. The enterprise model contains representations of individual facts, objects, and relationships that occur within the enterprise.

Keywords: IDEF; Process modelling; Manufacturing systems; Database of business processes

1. INTRODUCTION

In today's competitive global market, for the survival of any industry, manufacturing companies need to be flexible, adaptive, responsive to changes, and be able to produce a variety of products in a short time at a lower cost (Lee, et al., 2003). However, quite a lot of information is still kept in unstructured form in enterprises. It is the information neither typed into the database tables nor defined in diagrams. As a rule it exists as documents in different formats, drafts, reports, etc., which makes effective management of the manufacturing process difficult.

Enterprises need the technique and software that can help a manufacturer to manage the important parts of its business, including planning products, purchasing parts, maintaining inventories, interacting with suppliers, providing customer services and tracking orders. Typically, an ERP system uses or is integrated with a relational database (DB) system. The deployment of an ERP system can involve considerable business process analysis, employee retraining and new work procedures. But, ERP systems often wreak havoc in companies. Statistics show one of four companies admits suffering in a drop of performance. The most common reason for the performance problems is that everything looks and works differently from the way it did before. When people can't do their jobs in the familiar way, and haven't yet mastered the new way, they panic. Process modelling technique that needs to be used throughout SME has to be readily accessible with the minimum of training and support. The main reason of seldom using ERP systems in SME is its high cost.

Enterprise engineering takes a systematic approach to designing an enterprise. This implies the need for a top down approach, which considers all aspects of the enterprise, including its processes, resources, functions and control structure. The modelling method defined in this research must take into account the top-down nature of the problem and the need to integrate the various aspects of the enterprise.

There is doubt that business process modelling and engineering constitute an extremely important area of modern information technology. Being a very complex system to study, modern business process requires specific techniques to develop process models that can handle complexity using means of abstraction and decomposition, an that can further be used to simulate business process or apply some optimisation techniques (Soshnikov& Dubovik, 2004). The current research is based on case studies of developing databases for Estonian enterprises of engineering industry.

2. AN ENTERPRISE MODEL

A model is generally regarded as a representation of reality. The typical uses of modelling are (Whitman, 1998):

* To analyse and design the enterprise and its processes

* To help reduce complexity

* To communicate a common understanding of the system

* To act as a documentation tool for ISO 9000, TQM, Concurrent Engineering, and other efforts.

There are many ways to model an enterprise. This paper focuses on process-centred models of the enterprise.

Enterprises are socio-technological real-world systems. A system is a composition of elements and their relationships, which can be described by their structures (static view), as well as behaviour (dynamic view). Process models offer a systematic well-defined way of representing the structure of a firm's operations (Salvendy, 2001).

A process model must provide many perspectives of the enterprise if it is to adequately describe an enterprise and its processes. These perspectives, or views, are required because of the different types of information available about the enterprise and because of the different types of questions people want to be answered by the model. The four most common perspectives are (Curtis et al. 1992):

* functional: what process elements are being performed, and what flows of information entities are relevant to these process elements;

* behavior: when process elements are performed (sequencing);

* organizational (resource): where and by whom processes are performed, physical communications mechanisms, storage media and locations;

* informational: what information entities are produced or manipulated by the process. Includes data, products, and objects.

An enterprise model is a symbolic representation of the enterprise and all the things it deals with. The enterprise model contains representations of individual facts, objects, and relationships that occur within the enterprise. Enterprise models can assist the goal of enterprise engineering by helping to represent and analyse the structure of activities and their interactions. There are, of course, many types of process models. The most common are probably flow charts, which represent a process as a series of steps with arrows connecting the order in which they are performed.

3. DATABASE OF BUSINESS PROCESSES

Business processes are collections of enterprise activities organized to meet some goal. Activities are useful only when organized into these business processes.

IDEF0 is a static modelling paradigm that represents a system as a network of inter-connected activities. It uses a mix of graphics and natural language to capture and communicate process details. IDEF0 can be used to produce structured documentation suitable for ISO 9000. The basic uses for process models include facilitating human understanding and communication, supporting process improvement and process management, automating process guidance and execution support. Development of a database, which includes the needed information of all the processes (workflows) in an organization and their full-scale documentation, is the most suitable way for a SME. A process model in the database describes the entire life cycle of products, providing relation between several parts of information. Procedures of ISO 9000 may be taken as a base for implementation of this work.

4. ANALYSIS OF THE MODELED PROCESS

Software tools for business process modelling and analysis provide the ability to define and build a model of a business process and then use statistical modelling to analyse its behaviour under various scenarios of modelling real business conditions.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

Analysis of the modelled process leads to a better understanding of the business operations, critical flaws in the current operational conditions, ways of optimising them, and an assessment of the resources required to ensure performance consistent with expectations. These analytical activities have often resulted in significant improvement in operational efficiency and process improvement.

Certainly, all the processes are interrelated and connected with instructions and forms, and implemented by the employees using the same equipment, tools, and engines. The process knowledge library has to include this information in its structure and attainment routes.

Information, included in the database for supporting, analysis and improvement of the business processes is introduced in figure 1.

The data, the process flow and the analysis are often the combination that allows clear identification of bottlenecks, waste in the operation, root cause determination and prioritisation of breakthrough opportunities.

5. DISCUSSION

Business process modelling and simulation is a way for businesses to reduce the risk of introducing change. Effective modelling and simulation will reduce the chances of these problems occurring and increase the certainty that proposed changes will deliver the anticipated benefits.

In the work are many methodologies developed both for detailed business process analysis (IDEF0, IDEF1X, etc.) and for knowledge representation and extraction (IDEF5, etc.).

Using of the business processes database can bring with the following advantages:

* Automatic description and recording of workflows;

* Extensive workflow analysis and improvement;

* Documentation of competencies and responsibilities according to ISO 9000 quality certificate;

* Base for optimisation of business process;

* Identifying "bottlenecks" of the workflow.

Acknowledgements Hereby we thank the Estonian Science Foundation enabling us to carry out this work (grant 5636).

6. REFERENCES

Whitman, L.; Huff, B. & Presley, A (1998) Issues Encountered Between Model Views, Appeared in Flexible Automation and Integrated Manufacturing Conference Proceedings, Begell House, Inc. 79 Madison Avenue, New York

Salvendy, G. (2001) Handbook of Industrial Engineering: Technology and Operation Management, A Wiley-Interscience Publication JOHN WILEY ??SONS, INC., New York, ISBN 0-471-33057-4

Curtis, B., M. I. Kellner, et al. (1992) "Process Modeling" Communications of the ACM 35 (9): 75-90

Soshnikov, D. & Dubovik, S. (2004) Knowledge-Based Business Process Modeling and Simulation, Workshop on Computer Science and Information Technologies CSIT2004, pp. 169-176, Budapest, Hungary

Lee, Y. T., McLean, C., and G. Shao. (2003) A Neutral information model for simulating machine shop operations. Proceedings of the 2003 Winter Simulation Conference, ed. S. Chick, pp. 1296-1304