Flowcharts, data flows, SADT, IDEF and NIAM for enterprise engineering

Numerous modeling tools of diagrammatic nature are available today, whether for incremental (TQM style) or radical (reengineering, BPR style) enterprise improvement. In practice, two simple techniques dominate: flowcharts and data flow diagrams. Very few reengineering specialists realize that these techniques are too primitive and inadequate when used for large scale business process analysis. IDEF0 and IDEF1X, more sophisticated tools, have also been used extensively for BPR purposes, but also with mixed results. The authors point out to the need of further development work, and present an outline of their proposal (called NIDEF) based on the synthesis of NIAM, SADT and IDEF0.