Tools for Business Process Modelling:

Business Process Management Tools - A market evaluation and comparison study,  IAO Fraunhofer , 2001

Motivation and objective : Business processes represent the heart of enterprise life action. Choice of the right core business processes may govern the profitability of an entire enterprise. Today, solid methodologies and flexible, versatile tools for design, planning, analysis and control of business processes are available on the market and serve to support decision making and many other business tasks. The objective of the study has been to provide business users with an overview and evaluation of commercial  Business Process Management (BPM) tools in order to support them in selecting the best fitting tool for their individual requirements.

A total of 32 BPM tools, split into five tool categories has been investigated, namely tools for process visualisation, process modelling, process simulation, workflow management and computer aided software engineering.

Eleven criteria have been defined and applied to evaluate each tool: Architecture and configuration capabilities, Range of application areas, Model Views concept, to reduce the complexity of the presentation, Modelling methods – the underlying concepts, Modelling process – how to create a model, Model Integrity protection, User support, Capabilities for analysis, simulation and optimisation, Import/export facilities, Internet functionalities, Documentation and ease-of-learning

These criteria have been applied when modelling a reference scenario with the tool. Three scenarios were defined: A) Documentation of a set of as-is processes to describe a quality management system, B) Identification, documentation and optimisation of resource intensive processes C) organisation development with a distributed team of experts. The three scenarios require different weight factors for the criteria.

The score results of the criteria of the investigated tools cover a range between 1 and 9. For process modelling tools, the total scores are not very different. ARIS receives the highest total score, which may be explained by the fact that ARIS is capable to deploy several modelling methods.

The Study »Business Process Management Tools – Eine evaluierende Marktstudie über aktuelle Werkzeuge« (- An evaluating market study of current tools) , 450 pages, in German, can be purchased from the IAO-Shop, http://www.iao.fhg.de/d/shop/.
 

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