Authors: Georgios Papadopoulos, Sotiris Gayialis, Georgios Stavropoulos, Ilias Tatsiopoulos

Title: An Application of Business Process Modeling in a Small-To-Medium Industrial Company

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to present the methodological approach applied in a Small-To-Medium Enterprise (SME) in order to model and document the production planning and control processes as well as the involved information systems. Business Process Modeling assisted the SME to formulate and document in a systematic way, its business processes, to identify problematic areas, to apply business process improvements, and to integrate business processes with information systems and organizational units in an operations manual. The existing process instance (AS-IS) was extracted from previously created unstructured documents of the processes and new business process models were created (process diagrams). The modeling method used was BPMN 2.0.The software tool that has been used to model the processes was ADONIS Community Edition 3.0. For better understanding of the structure and the processes of the company, business process models included company’s organization chart. IT models were also created depicting company’s information systems structure. Finally, a business process manual was created for the production planning and control processes. This manual integrates business processes with the involved information systems and the organizational units of the company as well as some guidelines for executing critical activities of business processes.