[11] DejaVU Online: Principles of Object-Oriented Software Development (©)
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Example -- requests for loans

Instructor's Guide

intro, objects modeling, simulation, visualization, legacy summary, Q/A, literature
Now let us take a look at an example business process model based on the objects made available in BPSIM. The example will detail possible situations before and after business process redesign has taken place.
slide: Processing alternatives
Current situation:
Our first model, slide models (left), which represents the current situation, consists of a client producing, for example, requests for a loan at a bank. The requests are initially handled by a clerk whose task is to send requests for amounts greater than $10,000 to the boss. The boss, whose task is to approve or deny the loan, sends the result back to the clerk for processing. If the amount is less than $10,000, the clerk has authority to process the request himself.
Redesign alternative:
In our second model, slide models(right), which is the result of a redesign effort, requests are handled by a clerk who enters the data into a computer. The computer now makes the decision as to whether the loan is improved -- for loans of value less than and greater than 10,000. The clerk then passes the results on to another clerk for the task of dispatching loans.
slide: Presenting a redesign alternative

In slide present-models the visual representation of the model resulting from the redesign effort is shown, embedded in a Web page. In addition to the model, the page contains some results obtained by running a simulation. For example, the text indicates that an employee is busy handling incoming requests only 33\% of the time. The histogram depicts the distribution of the lead times of incoming loan requests, that is the time that passes between receiving a request and giving an answer. The Web page further contains a button to start a simulation run, a description of the model and links to alternative models.

The script

In the fragment below, a histogram for recording leadtimes is created as well as an agent generating requests and a transport to a clerk handling the requests. 
  histogram leadtimes
  agent client generate leadtimes
  client -duration 60 poisson
  transport t1 
  t1 -duration 20
  employee clerk
  operation receive clerk
  receive -duration 20.0 5.0 normal
slide: The script
The duration of the agent is specified using a poisson distribution with \lambda = 60. The clerk is declared to perform a receive operation, the duration of which takes values from a normal distribution with \mboxmeans = 20 and \mboxstandard deviation = 5.0. After defining the components of the model and their connection a simulation may be started by pressing the start button. If desired, users may change the parameters concerning for example setup and wait time, to explore the various scenarios a model has to satisfy.

Discussion

 As observed in  [Wastell94], organizational change is a `highly threatening and stressful experience for many participants and ... high levels of stress can have a pernicious effect on individuals, group processes and organizational learning'. Hence, directly involving the users in the modeling phase of the BPR project may be an important step towards capturing the human aspects that are necessary for the production of an optimal model. It may also help to lessen the anxiety of employees.

On a technological level, we advocate the use of business process simulation. Nevertheless, to accomodate the social aspects, it is important to support the visualization of such models and their integration in an arbitrarily complex information context, such as the World Wide Web. Developing visualisation and animation support for simulation models is a topic of ongoing research. See section DIVA.

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Hush Online Technology
hush@cs.vu.nl
12/30/99