Using Stocks and Flows Diagrams to Understand Business Process Behavior

Abstract

Business Process Modeling has over the years focused in the activities and the logic how work gets done. That is reflected in the modeling notations like BPMN, which show the sequence of activities, their performers and the different paths each instance of the process can take. However, the performance of an organization and its business processes are measured aggregating the flow of the results of single process instances. Often the flows are not running smoothly but there are variations, delays, accumulations and other phenomena, which can be causes for the processes not to meet their expected performance levels. Therefore understanding the behavior of the business process over time is critical for any improvement initiative. In this paper we show how stocks and flows diagrams can be used to model business processes and how that model can be simulated to understand its behavior over time. Simulations can help in revealing the critical points to remove bottlenecks and improve the overall performance of the processes. First we a simple introduction to modeling business processes using stocks and flows diagrams. The we describe a real life case using stocks and flows models and simulation to reveal a problem and proposing a solution in health care environment.