Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Identify risks-benefits of a future process design based on simulation

 
IBM Certification Test 992.3 - Simulation

Identify risks/benefits of a future process design based on simulation data and process design goals

The key to a successful re-engineering of a business process is to thoroughly understand the details of the existing process and to accurately forecast the results of the changes to that process. In order to analyze and predict the outcome of a revised process, a business first has to create an accurate representation of the process with a model and then must study how that process performs under different conditions.

A common error that businesses often make when they set out to revise their processes is failing to fully investigate and understand their current process and their objectives in re-engineering that process. Without devoting the necessary time to study, analyze, and plan, many businesses find that either they have not adequately addressed the original problem, or they have simply exchanged a recognized problem for another unanticipated one.

Before implementing a future business process, you must comprehensively document, model, and analyze the current business process so that you can fully understand where the business problems lie and set realistic targets for the future business process.
 
WebSphere Business Modeler particularly supports business process methodologies that use comparative analyses between two states of models. The first state, the current model, represents the business processes as they are currently working. It has two primary purposes: to identify problem areas such as bottlenecks and inefficiencies and to serve as a baseline for the second state. The second state is a set of what-if models that solve the problems identified in the first state in various ways. From the second state, the business modeling team identifies one model from the set as the best solution.
 

Risks/Benefits

Risks Benefits

The future business process (to-be) is only as good as the modeling, simulation, and analysis of the current business process (as-is).

 

The following are some of the risks that you should be aware of when using simulation data to design a future business process:

 

  • If the as-is business process model does not accurately reflect/describe the existing business process, then the simulation results will be misleading.
  • If the as-is business process model contains critical error/s before simulation, then the simulation results will be misleading.
  • If the simulation settings used to run the simulation are not properly set, then the simulation results will be misleading.
  • If the simulation results are not properly analyzed and validated, then wrong conclusions maybe made.
  • If business objectives are not explicitly defined and measurable, then it is difficult to determine if the business process meets business objectives.

 

When you have completed modeling the current business process, you can simulate it.  Simulating allows you to assess the performance of the process, generate statistics, and pinpoint potential areas of improvement.

 

The following are some of the benefits that you can derive when using simulation data to design a future business process:

 

  • Cost
    The cost of simulating a business process is negligible compared to deploying a business process and finding out there are design flaws.
  • Time
    The time spent in simulating a business process is negligible because you can control the duration of a simulation through various simulation settings.
  • Unlimited what-if scenarios
    You can experiment with an un-limited number of "what-if" scenarios through various simulation settings without changing the business process model.

 

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