Towards a Human Reliability Analysis in process modelling: An empirical investigation

Process models are an integrative part of Business Process Management and their benefit is well-accepted in corporate practice. Besides syntactical and semantical errors, the occurrence of inconsistencies between a process model and the real-world process is a common phenomenon in corporate practice. In this contribution, the concept of Human Error is applied to process modelling and marks the starting point for a Human Reliability Analysis. The error classification that has been used accounts for generic error types of omission and execution, complemented with a defined scope of error types for the application context process modelling. The results derived from data of 19 participants indicate that the modelling of concurrent and iterative flows is prone to errors of omission and erroneous execution. Possible inconsistencies between the process model and the real-world process might leave efficiency potential uncovered, especially with regard to concurrent engineering activities.