Integrating BPR with image-based work flow

Almost every business process re-engineering (BPR) engagement begins with a ´process capture´ phase. The BPR team goes to the process owners and with their assistance develops a complete description of how the business is currently conducted. The results of this are used to select those processes within the business which offer the potential for dramatic savings if re-engineered. These may then be modeled in more detail and analyzed, from the point of view of evaluating the benefit. The analysis may require the use of both activity-based costing (ABC) tools and simulation. Ultimately, the implementation of the re-engineered processes may employ a work-flow system. Building this should be more than guided by the BPR effort. The process capture, if done with the appropriate software tools, can feed directly into both the BPR analysis (ABC, simulation, etc.) and the work-flow implementation. This greatly reduces the cost and time to employ simulation and build the implementation. We describe this approach.