ASZ, which is the IT company of the GAK Group, builds and maintains the information systems that the GAK is using. Currently, the information infrastructure consists of several large databases, hundreds of separate applications and little integration. To improve this, ASZ is investigating a software architecture that combines the databases, legacy software and new applications into a highly integrated system.
This development will certainly have an impact on the business processes at the GAK. The company will be able to improve current services and to offer new ones. However, deciding how the new business processes must be organized and what the consequences of some decisions will be is not at all trivial.
To assist the managers in studying the alternatives we create business-process simulations to execute the re-design alternatives (Eliëns et al., 1996). The managers are now able to run the simulations and experiment with the re-design alternatives themselves. To fully exploit the potential of business simulations we allow the managers to visualize and discuss both the results of the simulation, e.g. the costs and profits, and the running simulation itself, e.g. to illustrate the activities in the re-designed alternative.