Business Process Analysis and Simulation: The Contact Center of a Public Health and Social Information Office

Abstract

This article proposes a framework, called BP-M* which includes: 1) a methodology to analyze, engineer, restructure and implement business processes, and 2) a process model that extends the process diagram with the specification of resources that execute the process activities, allocation policies, schedules, times of activities, management of queues in input to the activities and workloads so that the same model can be simulated by a discrete event simulator. The BP-M* framework has been applied to a real case study, a public Contact Center which provides different typologies of answers to users’ requests. The simulation allows to study different system operating scenarios (“What-If” analysis) providing useful information for analysts to evaluate restructuring actions.