Process Power

Can visualization and simulation improve your business process reengineering experience?

Mark M. Davydov     

Are you interested in documenting your company's most mission-critical business processes? Have you been assigned responsibility for staff scheduling, shift planning, and capacity planning? Do you need a technical analysis tool that will work with process-related data in real time? Or, are you involved in a large application-integration or data warehousing effort? If so, then you will want to take a look at ProcessModel release 4.0.

ProcessModel has two product setups: the Basic (Full) package and the Professional package. ProcessModel Professional includes an optimization module, which automates the process of running experiments and ranks the results according to a set of success criteria that you define.

I tested the Basic package, which includes the standard flowcharting functions and three special features: Live Animation (to help you visually determine how people, documents, and other objects are flowing through the system), the OneStep modeling approach (which lets you easily describe complex processes), and Visual Staffing (able to describe extensive staffing functions).

Overall, the tool is easy to use, highly graphically oriented, and very appropriate for enterprise process modeling and business process reengineering (BPR) activities, especially for conducting analysis in the following areas:

• Staff scheduling and shift planning
• Capacity planning
• Job sequencing
• Production scheduling
• Productivity improvement
• Bottleneck analysis.

Also, ProcessModel could be helpful for developing process maps for the primary activities in many application-integration and data warehousing projects, especially data migration tasks. The graphical process maps ProcessModel produces are excellent guides to reducing time-consuming activities.

To a large degree, the main advantage of this tool compared to its competitors - such as CACI International Inc.'s SimProcess, Tecnomatix Technologies Ltd.'s SIMPLE++ (now absorbed into Process Simulation Applications suite), Systems Modeling Corp.'s Arena, and Imagine That Inc.'s Extend & BPR - is that ProcessModel seamlessly combines flowcharting and process modeling with realtime animation and simulation of process executions. These features provide an animated and highly closed simulation of processes that enables all kinds of "what-if" analysis.

To understand the tool, you need to be aware of what constitutes process modeling in general. Process modeling is a method of identifying operational activities carried out by an organization. A process model describes what kinds of operations exist within the modeled processes, the flow between operations (the logical or temporal execution sequence of process activities), and what events within them trigger the execution of other processes.

With ProcessModel, you'll use a basic modeling process that includes the following six steps:

• Analyze requirements and formulate objectives for the model.
• Define operations and process flow (create a flowchart).
• Define resource requirements for each operation.
• Enter process information, such as activity times and the number of resources.
• Simulate the process model.
• View outputs.

  ProcessModel's flowcharting module was built from Micrografx's iGrafx Professional (formerly FlowCharter). This module provides a set of predefined shape palettes with thousands of diagramming and technical shapes. There are six basic types of "graphical objects" you can use to create a flowchart:

• Entity
• Activity
• Storage
• Resource
• Connection
• Link.

Entities are objects that flow through the process - such as customers, phone calls, messages, and data. Activities deal with entities, and connections between activities indicate graphically how activities are related to each other. Graphical representations of connections fall into four categories:

• Routings - depict how entities move from one activity or storage to another (there are 10 routing types).
• Arrivals - depict how entities arrive from outside into the process (there are five arrival types).
• Order signals - depict when entities should be sent into the process, or from one activity or storage to another.
• Resource assignments - an optional category used to depict when a resource is required to perform an activity or move an entity.

Storage is an object that represents holding places for entities and identifies options for the order in which entities leave the storage (FIFO, LIFO, and so on). Resources are objects (such as person, facility, equipment, or system device) that are required for an activity to occur. ProcessModel provides substantial flexibility in defining these resources. For example, you can assign a resource of any type to shifts, so that the model can represent how the process will run at specific time periods (8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. workdays, for example). Finally, there are special icons on the flowchart used for linking seamlessly to other applications, such as Microsoft Word or Excel.

You create a process flowchart by dragging shapes from shape palettes; the shapes represent modeled activities such as "Answer Telephone," "Send Mail," "File Invoice," and so on. (See Figures 1 and 2). You add process information - such as naming of steps and definitions of estimated times, costs, and resources needed to perform tasks - by filling in details to the ProcessModel properties box (which, in the product, is called a "property sheet").

ProcessModel simulates processes by animating the created flowchart, visualizing how entities move through the process and identifying resources' status - most important of which are bottlenecks and idle time. Status lights change color to indicate whether each resource is idle, in operation, or unavailable. The best feature of animation is that it depicts dynamics (filling and emptying) of input and output queues due to variances in activity times, unavailability of resources, shift schedules, and so on. ProcessModel provides the on-screen "scoreboard" (which you can opt to turn off) that automatically tracks throughput, cycle time, base time, value-added time, and unit cost for each entity type.

You can stop the simulation at any point to add or remove a resource or change the flow of entities. You then rerun the simulation to view the new results. Process runs can be scheduled for a set period, such as a 40-hour workweek. The animation can be turned off to increase execution speed, as is typical practice when executing lengthy runs of large, complex simulation models. The tool collects data and presents a statistical summary after the run. It makes several formats available to represent statistics: numerical reports, graphs such as bar graphs and pie charts, and time series plots (values over time). I have found graphs of throughput, utilization, and capacity to be the most useful. Summary reports can be edited with the "Save As" and "Export" features.

Be careful: It is necessary to clearly understand how ProcessModel handles capacity. In ProcessModel, there is a difference between the capacity at a storage object or a queue and the capacity at an activity. Storage or queue capacity refers to the number of entities (of any type) that may coexist there. Activity capacity refers to the number of entities that may be processing at one time.

You can run simulations without sample data (so-called "dry" runs), using multiple data distribution features such as normal, uniform, triangular, and user-defined or "empirical" distribution curves. Such runs are extremely helpful to get an overall understanding of how a process behaves. If sample data is available, ProcessModel loads it into a statistical curve using the Stat::Fit fitting package.

The tool's most powerful feature is its hierarchical modeling, with which you can represent an entire process using a coordinated set of subprocesses that consist of one or more activities. Subprocesses are defined as models in separate chart files; they link to the activities representing them. ProcessModel refers to a model that links to an activity in another model as a submodel. Submodels themselves may have activities representing other submodels in a hierarchical fashion. When a simulation is done on the overall model, ProcessModel simulates linked submodels as part of the entire model. Also, submodels can be simulated independently.

In terms of general characteristics of the tool, I'd like to highlight the following:

Tool Performance - Because ProcessModel compiles (rather than interprets) its models, runtime execution performance is good. For example, an order-taking model that deals with seven types of products where each type is handled by different activities (up to 24) and a different number of resources (up to 16) simulated one year of round-the-clock operation (8,760 hours) in 26 minutes of elapsed time. During this run, the model processed 436,000 entities. This run was performed on a Pentium 200MHz machine with 32MB of RAM.

Ease of Installation and Learning - Installation is very straightforward and requires less than five minutes. Ease of learning is excellent, with simple-to-follow tutorials and online help. There is a lot of good information in the user guide, describing many important features and how to use them. Overall, I think, it is possible to become productive with ProcessModel in one week with no formal training.

Debugging - ProcessModel provides effective debugging capabilities by tracing events that occur over the course of a simulation. Trace listings are descriptive enough to identify the majority of problems. There are two modes of tracing: Step (step-by-step tracing through one event at a time using the left mouse button) or Continuous.

ProcessModel is well suited to modeling all kinds of general and specialized business processes and systems. The software may also be used for enterprise architecture activities, although the tool is very limited in terms of identification of common activities that occur across processes in an enterprise from a high-level management perspective. Taken as a whole, this product provides excellent value to the prospective purchaser of process-simulation and model-building software.