Jim Sinur

I have seen the growth of simulation from the early days of the BPM. Some have said simulation is too complicated; others have said that simulation was not practical. Well it’s time to salt opinions with some feedback from those who have leveraged simulation. The case for simulation is growing by the day. Successful BPM implementers said that they wished that they had leveraged simulation sooner to help balance process outcomes and process behavior. You be the judge.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/02/10/extra-extra-simulation-is-bi-optimal/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/27/misconceptions-on-process-optimization-and-simulation/

I am encouraged by the growth of simulation in process activity at the front end of process design. It has grown from below 10% of process related projects to over 35%. This approach, of course, uses generated test cases (random for Monte Carlo simulation & arrival driven for discrete simulation). Simulation based on real data has grown from one or two percent to over 10%. What is even more encouraging are some of the real world problems being solved with simulation (some process focused others not).

Scenario Planning:

A number of organizations that are sensitive to changing financial conditions have decided to venture into scenario planning. This allows them to be ready for anticipated scenarios. Please see blog posts that can give some background.

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/07/27/scenario-driven-processes-a-future-reality/

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/01/02/scenario-planning-is-no-longer-optional/

Simulation can be helpful in anticipating the effects of the scenarios ahead of time and in some cases identify measures and tolerances that point to emerging scenarios. One organization, that I have talked to in the past, did just that and avoided nasty surprises during the last downturn

Test Mergers:

One organization, that I am aware of, uses simulation to determine if a merger will work well for their business. They use discrete simulation, not only to determine the impact on processes, but the resources necessary to operate them. They then add up the costs of needed resources to help determine the cost of the merger in the long term. This helps dramatically in the negotiation stages and the matching of skills necessary to support the merged operations in a cost effective way. This is a new use case for me.

Resource Allocation:

Organizations are constantly dealing with having the right amount of resources at the right time based on skills and times available. Please see the following for background

http://blogs.gartner.com/jim_sinur/2009/06/18/are-you-walking-the-resource-optimization-tightrope-try-skills-sensitive-processes/

A number of organizations are even taking this another step in simulating shared resources across multiple processes using live data and real resources. In a world where getting it closer to perfection, the more use of simulation for resource allocation is bound to happen. I have even seen some demonstrations of auto-optimization leveraging simulation and event mining.

GOT SIMULATION?

Simulation is not rampant yet, but the growth and number of applications is on the rise. I would love to hear about your experiences simulation

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Category: BPM Business Process Improvement Business Rules Optimization Simulation     Tags: BPM, Business Rules, Optimization, Simulation

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