A Process Analysis and Modeling Framework for the Concurrent Engineering of Business Processes and Manufacturing Activities – Conceptual Design

RICARDO VELEZ	REIJO TUOKKO
Robotics and Automation Laboratory
Institute of Production Engineering
Tampere University of Technology
Korkeakoulunkatu 6 33720 Tampere
FINLAND
	http://pe.tut.fi/

Abstract: - Manufacturer’s supply chains are growing enormously complex.  The move towards a knowledge-based economy is placing companies in an extremely tight position, with a balancing act between process innovation and competitiveness in the market to make enough profit to stay afloat. A framework for process analysis and modeling is proposed as a solution for handling the complexity of supply networks, enabling the concurrent deployment of business processes and manufacturing activities. The present paper introduces the conceptual design of such as framework.

Key-Words: - Modeling and Simulation, Business Process, Manufacturing Operations, Concurrent Engineering

1   Introduction
Manufacturer’s supply chains are growing enormously complex. With shorter product life cycles and ever-rising customer demands, as well as the increasing spread of distribution, manufacturing, sourcing, and engineering operations around the globe, companies large and small are finding it more difficult to synchronize all the pieces. [1]
     In addition, the changes in the market towards a knowledge-based economy are placing manufacturing companies in an extremely tight position, with a balancing act between process innovation and competitiveness in the market to make enough profit to stay afloat.
     The combination of all these problematic fronts, forces manufacturers to optimize on a local scale, be that function, facility, product, country, or continent. This in turn places companies on a blind spot to global efficiency, due to the lack of visibility of cause-and-effect scenarios from one business process to the next.
     A process analysis and modeling framework is proposed to solve these issues, enabling on a large scale, the concurrent engineering of business processes and manufacturing activities. Concurrent engineering has been used for the past decade to aid in the harmonious development of products, manufacturing processes and production systems. The present research proposed the use of concurrent engineering approaches for the design and development of business processes and manufacturing operations. The framework proposes means of modeling and analysis of the different processes involved in designing, producing and delivering a product, since it takes into consideration the whole value chain. By value chain, it refers not only supply chain operations (planning, sourcing, manufacturing, and logistics) but also the product development activities (R&D, innovation, product design, engineering and transition), and the customer-related activities (marketing, sales, and service). [1]
     The framework would enable the modeling and analysis of the dynamic reconfiguration of manufacturing capabilities and their effect on business processes, and the modeling and analysis of the dynamic reconfiguration of business processes and their effect on manufacturing operations. 
     The present paper is divided into four sections. First, an introduction is given to the paper, giving an overview of the structure of the paper. Background information is given in section two, setting the fundamental topics for section three. The conceptualization of the modeling and analysis framework is done in section three, providing an overview of the research, and the underlying infrastructure for such a framework. As a last section, conclusion and future work is introduced, as well as a list of the most relevant references is offered in the end.

2   Manufacturing Systems in a Complex Environment
Research indicates that three critical trends pull apart manufacturer’s supply chains and make them more complex and difficult to manage:
-	The unrelenting pressure to continually drive down supply chain costs, from product concept to delivery,
-	The pursuit of new lucrative markets and channels, and
-	The quickening pace of product innovation.

     Deloitte [2] made a global manufacturing study of over 800 manufacturers in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, with companies ranging industries such as consumer business, automotive, high tech, diversified industrials, pharmaceuticals, and the chemical sector. Results showed that only 7% of respondents are capable of managing the growing complexity of their supply chains, and dubs them “complexity masters”. Figure 1 shows a composite graph of the number of respondents, their value chain complexity and their value chain capabilities.

Fig. 1 Global complexity and value chain capabilities [2]

     The survey goes on to define that the ability to manage global value chain complexity in a profitable way comes down to two key factors: excellent customer-, product-, and supply-chain-related business processes; and excellent synchronization across those processes. Synchronization is achieved through four elements: collaboration, flexibility, visibility, and technology. They enable a manufacturer to orchestrate and optimize the activities, decision, and actions of employees in product development, demand-creation, and supply chain processes scattered across the world. [2]
     More over, manufacturing industry is going through a paradigm shift, driven by the changes in customer behavior that will require new visions by enterprises on collaboration, integration of the supply chain and an almost perfect optimization of business processes [3]. This in turn is fueling the changes from flexible automation to re-configurable manufacturing systems. The impact of RMS is presented in figure 2, where the darkest section represents the first wave of RMS, following to a lighter section and so on.

Fig. 2 RMS Impact [4]

     The combination of changes in the market and the factory floor place a manufacturing company in a position where managing complexity is a necessity. Many opt for optimizing locally, and miss the opportunities of global supply chain optimization.
     The authors present a framework as a solution to this problem, by providing tools to aid in the decision making on different levels of the enterprise. This framework is called Pro-AMOEBA – Process Analysis and Modeling for the Concurrent Engineering of Business Processes and Manufacturing Activities. 

3   Pro-AMOEBA
Pro-AMOEBA is a single framework that connects to the ocean of information of enterprise systems and factory floor equipment, uniting them under a process modeling platform for real time cause-and-effect analysis of the entire enterprise environment, and its main objective is to aid in the concurrent deployment of business processes and manufacturing activities. 
     The framework uses an analogy to an amoeba for its operations. An amoeba is a microscopic single-celled organism living in water, with simple form, but very successful [5]. Some contain one nucleus, but there are some that contain hundreds of nuclei. They use pseudopodia (false feet) to move and eat. An amoeba is a first order autopoietic (self-regeneration) system. [6]
     Making the analogy to an operations framework, there can be one nucleus company that runs the framework, or many that share information directly and on real-time. If the supply chain partner’s whish is to add a new member for a short period of time, the framework would use pseudopodia to connect to those companies, extending its services for a limited period of time to the guest company, and removing such link when resources are depleted. 
     Also, the framework serves as a central repository of information for the reconfiguration of the supply chain and the factory floor and related processes. 
     Pro-AMOEBA has two main modes of operation: execution, and modeling and simulation. Both modes present great challenges and opportunities for development, and are described in the following sections.

2.1	Execution
The main role of the execution mode is that of a business process management framework. In the 1990’s business process reengineering appeared as the radical redesign of business processes for dramatic improvements. Focus used to be on the “radical” part of reengineering; however, the most important aspect is “process”, which is a complete end-to-end set of activities that together create value to the customer. [7]
     Process-centered organizations demand the complete reinvention of the systems and disciplines of management. There are four key issues to be dealt with if a company wants to be a successful process-centered organization [7]:
-	Work: examines the nature of process-centered work and what it means for the people who perform it
-	Management: the new role and nature of the managerial activity
-	Enterprise: issues to be considered to formulate a business strategy
-	Society: the effects of process-centered organizations on the lives of all who live in societies based on them

     The Pro-AMOEBA framework aims at facilitating the analysis of the four issues by providing an easy-to-use interface based on semiotic theory for its design, enabling a rich user experience.
     The system would be built on top of a knowledge management system that would facilitate the transfer of knowledge from one domain to another, and from one phase of the process life cycle to the next. With the integration of the different systems under a single framework, it would enable the closing of the knowledge gap between manufacturing activities and enterprise level, on both execution and planning, by allowing the real-time cause-and-effect analysis of changes in either side of the enterprise. 
     This would be achieved by process mapping, which is a way to graphically represent the transactions and stories that make up a business. This is used because business objectives sometimes are incompatible, and managers must juggle conflicting priorities to achieve a successful outcome. Process mapping provides a method for taking a holistic approach to the analysis of business processes [8], and it introduces a way to represent the connectivity between the business process in question and the underlying IT infrastructure. This is represented in figure 3.
     The KMS focuses on understanding how knowledge is acquired, created, stored and utilized within an organization. It is a well known fact that needed knowledge is not presented in the optimal form, or it is not straightly available for the needed purpose. Instead, most likely the knowledge is incomplete, non-structured and non-uniform. The KMS will be able to overcome those problems by utilizing suitable query languages, data mining techniques and search engines.

Fig. 3 Business process mapping

     The definition of business processes will be made according to standards, such as the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model, and its related models, DCOR and CCOR, along with ISA 95 for manufacturing execution systems. Process ontology will be developed to standardize the concepts used in the system, as well as in the enterprise. 
     Figure 4 shows the schematic representation of the Pro-AMOEBA framework, and several of its components.

Fig. 4 Pro-AMOEBA Framework

     The tools and methods used to analyze the enterprise information are used by both the execution and the modeling and simulation mode, and this will be introduced in the following section.

2.2 Modeling and Simulation
Modeling and simulation technologies represent tremendous opportunities for radical improvement of our ability to design, develop, manufacture, operate, and support complex products – to reduce the time and cost of translating products from concept to delivered systems, to improve operational performance and availability, and to reduce total cost of ownership. [9]
     The IMTI roadmap [9] defines four focused high-level goals, which are used as guidelines for development of the modeling and simulation mode of the framework. These goals are shown in figure 5.

Fig. 5 IMTI M&S high-level goals [9]

     The development will also follow the requirements presented in [10] for an effective strategic business simulation, which are as follows:
-	It must be realistic
-	User driven
-	Accessible to anyone
-	Easy to use
-	Fast development time of models
-	Fast run time
-	Cost effective

     The modeling and simulation framework will be generic, using High-Level Architecture to enable model reuse and portability. 
     The framework would enable the modeling and analysis of the dynamic reconfiguration of manufacturing capabilities and their effect on business processes, and the modeling and analysis of the dynamic reconfiguration of business processes and their effect on manufacturing operations.
     It includes also the mapping of business strategies into manufacturing operations, analyzing the effects of the different operating strategies and the comparison to the capabilities of the company, identifying gaps and opportunities of development for the company.
     The M&S mode will include the following tools and methods.

2.2.1	Advanced Cost Modeling
A total cost of ownership (TCO) methodology will be developed or extended to be used in the planning stages, as well as in execution. It will enable the real-time cost analysis of distributed and dynamic manufacturing operations in a supply chain environment.

2.2.2   Supply Chain Optimization
This includes modeling and optimization methodologies that would aid in the development and deployment of enterprise networks, which would model the dynamic reconfiguration of the value chain, and make trade-off analysis between outsourcing or in-house jobs, and partner selection.

2.2.3   Multi-Scale/hierarchical Modeling
The main development is a methodology for develop a methodology for multi-scale/hierarchical modeling of manufacturing systems, directly connected to the simulation framework that would enable the viewing of information from machine level to supply chain level. This would also include the filtering method of information from one level of abstraction to the next.

2.2.4   Distributed Modeling and Simulation
The need for distributed modeling and simulation arises when manufacturing operations are placed overseas and a local system must be kept updated to reflect the changes in the factory floor. The main development is a tool for distributed modeling and simulation without regard of local configuration or geographical location of the models.

Figure 6 shows a schematic representation of the simulation framework including business processes and manufacturing processes as the granular element for analysis, and its use in several industries.

Fig. 6 M&S schematic representation of business process analysis

4   Conclusion and Future Work
A global market and geographically dispersed operations due to the outsourcing trend to lower-wage countries are placing new challenges to manufacturing companies to become collaborative elements in the scheme of the supply chain.
     An operations and simulation framework is proposed as a solution to the complexity problem that manufacturing companies are facing due to market pressures.
     An internal research and development program has been started at the System Design Group of the Robotics and Automation Laboratory at Tampere University of Technology to address these issues and find a solution to the problems.
     The research program includes national and international project involving industrial partners that will serve as industrial case studies, providing valuable information on the operations of companies in a fast changing environment.

References:
[1]	Deloitte, The challenge of complexity – Critical trends in supply chain management across global manufacturing, Deloitte Manufacturing, November 2003
[2]	Deloitte, Mastering complexity in global manufacturing – Powering profits and growth through value chain synchronization, Deloitte Manufacturing, November 2003
[3]	Jovane, F., Koren, Y., B., Böer, C. R., Present and Future of Flexible Automation: Towards New Paradigms, Annals of the CIRP, Manufacturing Technology, vol. 52, no. 2, 2003
[4]	Velez, R., EManufacturing in Electronics Industry, M. Sc. Thesis, Tampere University of Technology, 2004
[5]	Oxford, Definitions of amoeba, Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus, Oxford University Press, 2001
[6]	Maula, M., Multinational Companies as Learning and Evolving Systems – A multiple-case study of knowledge-intensive service companies. An application of autopoiesis theory, Ph. D. Thesis, Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration, 1999
[7]	Hammer, M., Beyond Reengineering – How the process-centered organization is changing our work and our lives, HarperBusiness, 1996
[8]	Jacka, J. M., Keller, P. J., Business Process Mapping – Improving Customer Satisfaction, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002
[9]	IMTI, Modeling and Simulation for Affordable Manufacturing, Technology Roadmapping Initiative, IMTI, Inc., January 2003
[10]	Casti, J. L., Strategic Business Simulation, Complex Systems workshop, Tampere University of Technology, 2005