CEPE: Cooperative Editor for Processes Elicitation

Companies normally hire external consultants to carry out their business process re-engineering. While this can be straightforward in the short term, it does not produce the desired results in the mid and long term. A low level of worker involvement and a continuous dependency on external consultancy are the main drawbacks. We propose an alternative approach to BPR, specifically to workflow design, where company workers play an active role in re-designing the organization´s processes in a cooperative style. The paper describes the essence of a BPR method based on participatory design and stepwise refinement which we believe will generate better results than the traditional approach. We describe in detail the CEPE tool: Cooperative Editor for Processes Elicitation, which is a cooperative graphic editor that supports the building of the knowledge about the current process and its associated problems. That is the second phase of the proposed method.