Case-based reasoning methodology for business process knowledge management

Abstract

The turbulent business environment and rapidly evolving information technology (IT) forced organizations to change themselves continuously. Business process reengineering (BPR) or business reengineering (BR) has emerged as a means of gaining competitiveness in early 1990s. Although many organizations have launched enormous BPR projects in order to achieve dramatic improvement, they have confronted with difficult problems in BPR implementation with conflicting results. Two challenges facing BPR implementation, lack of consideration of knowledge aspects in managing business process and lack of the supporting method for generating alternative processes in redesign phase, have motivated us to develop a new method. The objective of this research is to suggest a case-based process modeling method, called CPM method, for supporting development of business process models in BPR. The CPM method provides BPR team with basis for generating alternative processes using past best-practice based on case-based reasoning. The CPM method is expected to facilitate reengineering by non-experts who have not actually performed the process modeling to conduct BPR projects. The CPM method consists of three phases. In the first phase, we identify the situation of current BPR project and retrieve the most similar BPR case from case base through hierarchical tree search and simple scoring method. In the second phase, based on retrieved case, we develop AS-IS process models for current BPR case. In the third phase, using the transformational knowledge of the retrieved case, we develop alternative TO-BE process models through building blocks, which are substituted for inefficient activities for the BPR goals. And we customize the alternative TO-BE process models through the synthesis procedure. By integrating these three phases, the method helps us to manage the business process knowledge and perform BPR project effectively. To support the CPM method, we are developing the prototype of cas...