Acquiring Knowledge for Business Process Re-Engineering

The field of Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR) aimed at enabling the large scale re-design of processes within organisations. BPR initiatives are by nature highly knowledge intensive activities. In this paper we argue that the knowledge based nature of BPR has not previously received sufficient recognition. We explain how BPR initiatives can be assisted through the use of techniques and tools that have their origins within the knowledge engineering community. In particular, we demonstrate the incorporation of knowledge acquisition (KA) techniques and the use of ontologies within a toolset that supports BPR. This toolset, named the Structured Process Elicitation and Demonstration Environment (SPEDE) has been developed to support both the acquisition and management of knowledge during BPR. SPEDE is currently being applied and validated within the aerospace and automotive industries