Business Process Simulation in Practice: An Empirical Study into Current Use and User Requirements

In Business Process Management, simulating business processes marks an essential analytic tool enabling organizations to prevent costly design and implementation flaws and to identify opportunities for process improvement. Despite a variety of simulation approaches and tools, surprisingly little is known about practitioners’ use of business process simulation, and about requirements of (prospective) users for simulation approaches and tools. To contribute to a knowledge base informing future construction-oriented research, the present research-in-progress compiles and synthesizes related contributions investigating business process simulation in practice. Findings inform a large-scale empirical investigation to provide current insights into the actual use of business process simulation in practice and user requirements for simulation approaches and tools. In this short paper, we report an organizing summary of related work, the design of the survey instrument, an outlook on future work and a discussion of pending challenges