流程优化文献翻译

Research on Business Processes Optimization for

Agile Manufacturing

Mi Zhiwei

Abstract

Based on macroscopic and synthetic approaches, especially information entropy

approach, the quantification of the flexible degree and order degree of business

processes is studied. According to the outcome of above analysis, a conceptual

model of optimizing business processes is proposed which supports to construct dynamic stable business processes. The research above has been applied in project

863/SDDACCIMS, and achieved primary benefits.

Key words: Agile Manufacturing, Business processes optimization, Dynamic stable

business processes, Information entropy, Decision-making support system

0 Introduction

Agile Manufacturing has been considered one of the most important mainstays of

national economic and social development. Agile Manufacturing has considered that

the environment of enterprises in an information age is continuously changing and

unpredictable. This is a kind of turbulent or chaotic environment. Current approaches

based on principle of division of labor to the design and construction of enterprise

systems leads to fixed business processes. This constrains the agility of business processes, often preventing close alignment between enterprises system behavior

and external changes. In such a severely challenging situation, Agile Manufacturing

has emphasized that enterprises for existence and growing must optimize their

business processes in order to construct dynamic stable business process structures

to cope with chaotic environment.

On the other hand, the traditional methodologies of optimizing business processes

are facing strong challenges. This is why the business processes are complex

systems. The complexities of system are reduced to its environmental chaos, its

structural high nonlinear and uncertainty. But these traditional methodologies based

on microscopic and quantitative mathematical models assume environment of

enterprises being relatively stationary. So the traditional methodologies of optimizing

business processes are difficult to cope with requirements of the complexities of

business processes.

In this paper, based on macroscopic and synthetic approaches, especially information entropy approach, the quantification of the flexible degree and order

degree of business processes is studied. According to the outcome of above analysis,

a conceptual model of optimizing business processes is proposed which supports to

construct dynamic stable business processes. The research above has been applied

in project SDDACCIMS supported by the High Technology Research and

Development Program me of China, and achieved primary benefits.

1 Analysis of Flexibility and Stability of Business Processes

The issue of flexibility has become increasingly important in optimizing business

processes. The need for flexibility is due to the changing nature of competition that

is based more than ever on both uncertain business processes themselves and the

chaotic nature of market situation. In other words, flexibility should represent the uncertainty and disorder which should permit the business process structures to be

adaptive, to be independent, to execute all actions with swiftness, to react promptly

to changing situation.

On the contrary, stability should mean the certainty and order that should help the

various business processes activities work harmoniously together toward heightened

collaboration and shared competitive aims.

In physical sciences, entropy is considered a measure of the degree of disorder.

Later, Shannon (1948) obtained the same expression in communication theory as a

measure of uncertainty of information or randomness of a probabilistic system. He

also called it entropy. In current years, the entropy measures have been successfully

applied in the field of statistical mechanics, economics, computer science, intelligent

decision and control theory. Formula of entropy is written by the information entropy theory as follow:

We also shall however call Eq.(1) the entropic measure of flexibility or stability.

We prefer to illustrate relationship among flexibility, entropy of business processes

and stability by a special example instead of proposing an abstract de-duce.

Let us take an extreme example of a business process that includes three tasks or

activities. We consider only three cases.

In case 1(Fig.1(a)), activity 1 is only related to predefined activity 2 while activity 2 is

only related to pre-defined activity 3. According to Eq.(1), the answer of flexibility of

the case 1 is nil.

In case 2 (Fig.1(b)), activity 1 may be related to two other activities with equal