Granting Flexibility to Business Process Management

The dynamic nature of the business environment today requires fl exibility so that enterprises may revise their structure and reorganize their workfl ows rapidly. Process-oriented approaches are emerging as a way to optimize business processes and rationalize interactions among enterprise departments to make way for changes in work practices and arrangements.Business intelligence (BI) and business activity monitoring (BAM) solutions can improve the management of existing business processes but offer limited help in the evaluation and assessment of different re-design proposals. What is needed is a systematic way for comparing process design options through simulation of the alternative business processes. First, we describe the BPM cycle and the state-of-the art in business process simulation. Next, we present the main requirements that business process simulators should meet and introduce our PROSIT business process simulator. The solution implements the main standards of BPM and provides. We describe its model, architecture, and implementation algorithm. The chapter concludes with remarks on future research directions.