Abstract

Recently, many companies are trying to survive in a competitive business environment and they employ various kinds of information systems. Business Process Management (BPM) system is a software system that integrated enterprise information systems based on processes, which is considered an essential element for managing inner and outer processes. Though the BPM system has been applied to major processes only so far, companies begin to extends target processes applied into enterprise wide. In such settings, not only exact but also efficient management of processes is required. The efficiency of BPM has two perspectives: one is the performance of users that handle assigned tasks, and the other is the performance of the Business Process (BP) engine that carries out execution of processes. In this paper, in order to deal with the seconde perspective, we develop Drum, Buffer, and Rope (DBR) method, which have been considered innovative Theory of Constraint (TOC) method in manufacturing domain, for efficient management of processes. A new method, BP-DBR, has been developed, and we show that it is effective for business processes. The effectiveness of the method has been proved in terms of efficiency measures such as average process completion time and average number of completed processes, through a series of simulations on real banking processes.

Keywords

• Business Process Efficiency;
• Business Process Management;
• Theory of Constraints;
• Drum-Buffer-Rope;
• Simulation