Software engineering methods, models, and tools to support business process reengineering

This thesis presents a framework for the support of business process reengineering (BPR), with the goal of bringing together the two important fields of software engineering and BPR in a conceptual environment for process capture and management. Key to the environment is the transformation of a process into the neutral conceptual framework suggested by James Armitage and Marc Kellner in "A Conceptual Schema for Process Definitions and Models." The three identified process objects (agents, activities, and artifacts), the object's intra- and inter-relationships, and overall behavioral characteristics are mapped into a generic process meta-model matrix. The generic process meta-model matrix serves as a means of comparison for six existing process notations. The six notations are then ranked by their ability to represent the twenty-seven identified generic process features. The significance of the business concepts of: customer-supplier value chain, two-party communication outcomes, process states, and workflow cycle time to process representation within a process framework are also discussed.