Business process redesign at a mental healthcare institute: a coulored petri net approach

Business Process Redesign aims to radically improve the performance of business processes. One of the approaches to derive such an improved process design is an evolutionary approach, making use of redesign heuristics (Reijers, 2003). Simulation of the redesigned business process comes into play if one has to decide whether the redesign is better than the previous process design, or if one needs to compare alternative redesigns. Usually, the characteristics of the process are such that a purely analytical performance evaluation is not feasible. This paper shows the applicability of coloured Petri nets, especially CPN Tools, in such a redesign approach. The starting point of the paper is a case study in a mental healthcare institute, which focussed on improvement of the intake process: reduction of flow time and service time. We show the initial CPN model and an alternative redesigned CPN model for the intake process and evaluate the impact on flow time and service time. In line with previous research, we conclude that coloured Petri nets are well suited to model and simulate business processes. Applying Monitors in addition to the regular CPN Tools package helped us to carry out the simulations in such a way that we were able to carry out statistical analysis, enabling us to compare the performance of different models. An important drawback of our approach is that modelling resources in a business process is quite laborious and results in complex constructions, which are hard to communicate with people who should be able to evaluate the effect of a particular redesign.