Quantitative assessment and capacity planning of business processes in the service sector

This paper presents a framework for the quantitative assessment and optimization of business processes in the service sector. This topic gets increasing attention and importance on the background of the numerous outsourcing projects, which allow large organizations to concentrate on their core competences by delegating non core processes to external insourcers. We describe why it is of utmost importance for the insourcer to evaluate the business process in a quantitative way in order to reduce its business risk. We develop a capacity model that provides a first insight on the basis of load factors with very little computation effort. Next, we describe the development of a simulation model that is able to capture the dynamical aspects like delay fluctuations. An overtime model is elaborated which allows to level out the phases of peak load. The simulation model provides the number of daily overtime hours that the employees of the individual functional groups need to work. This overtime work can either be done by existing employees or by external freelancers