A systematic review of analytical management techniques in Business Process Modelling for SMEs beyond what-if-analysis and towards a framework for integrating them with BPM

Unquestionably, Business Process Modelling (BPM) is an increasingly popular research area for both organisations and enterprises due to its effectiveness in enabling better planning of resources, business reengineering and optimized business performance. The understanding of Business Process modelling is an essential approach for an Organization or Enterprise to achieve set objectives and improve its operations. Recent development has shown the importance of representing processes to carry out continuous improvement. The modelling and simulation of Business Processes has been able to show Business Analysts, and Managers where bottleneck exists in the system, how to optimize the Business Process to reduce cost of running the Organization, and the required resources needed for an Organization. Although large scale organizations have already been involved in such BPM applications, on the other hand, Small Medium Enterprises (SME) have not drawn much attention with this respect. It seems that SME need more practical tools for modelling and analysis with minimum expenses if possible. One approach to make BPM more applicable to SME but, also, to larger scale organizations would be to properly integrate it with analytical management computational techniques, including the game-theoretic analysis, the probabilistic modelling, the Markov-chain modelling and the Cognitive Maps methodology. In BPM research the Petri Nets methodology has already been involved in theory, applications and BPM Software tools. However, this is not the case in the previously mentioned as well as to other analytical management techniques. It is, therefore, important in BPM research to take into account such techniques. This paper presents an overview of some important analytical management computational techniques, as the above, that could be integrated in the BPM framework. It provides an overview along with examples of the applicability of such methods in the BPM field. The major goal of this systematic overview is to propose steps for the integration of such analytical techniques in the BPM framework so that they could be widely applied especially for SME since currently are well suited to smaller scale problems.

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