A framework for customer oriented business process modelling

A new approach for customer oriented business process modelling is presented in the paper in a procedural format, The practical application of the approach to a real world case at Neste Advanced Power Systems Finland is described, Although customer orientation is central in current discussions about business strategies, the current functional modelling methods of business processes do not fully support the customer viewpoint, The approach combines formally the internal analysis of the business processes and the external analysis of the customer expectations about their performance, The formalism used is based on a new statistically extended version of QFD (Quality Function Deployment) and on the statistical analysis of the business process variables starting from an IDEF0 description of the business processes. The statistically extended QFD brings traditional QFD more close to customer needs associated to operational business process design, The approach also guides in planning the simulation experiments with dynamic simulation software packages so that the customer's voice is taken into account when selecting the parameters to vary in the behavioural simulation, Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.