To realize the target business process in the assumed business environment, it is essential to have the ability to understand the process design elements and their settings that are effective in achieving the goal, and the ability to select the most appropriate one among multiple alternatives derived from the combinations of those design elements and settings. In service businesses such as IT support services and factory maintenance services, which provide intangible products such as actions, it is necessary to take into account the effects of two types of uncertainty: uncertainty caused by the external environment, which is the probabilistic generation of demands due to demand that is difficult to predict, and uncertainty caused by the internal environment, which is the generation of processing costs other than planned processing such as exceptions and communications for coordination that occur probabilistically in the processing process. Therefore, this study proposes a business process design methodology based on discrete event simulation through a case study of a business process in the IT department of one company that processes for both predictable and unpredictable demand. In the proposed design method, service business process design is classified into two categories, static structure design and operational guideline design, and Design Variables are selected from each category. By changing the settings of the selected Design Variables, various combinations of alternative processes were created, and process designs that satisfy the goals were identified through simulation predictions. The case study results showed that the proposed method can efficiently explore optimal business process designs by identifying Design Variables and their settings that are effective in achieving goals. The case study quantitatively showed the effect of a change in the method of selecting the next request to be processed on improving the reliability of the process.
Suzuki et al. (Thu,) studied this question.