Strategic approaches to engineering design process modelling

The effective and efficient management of information across an enterprise, and detailed understanding of the business environment is critical to long‐term sustainable success. It is necessary to focus enterprise activities on meeting order qualifying and order winning criteria (OQC, OWC). Where customer information is embedded in a function‐centered business process, such as engineering design office “response‐to‐tender”, a greater understanding can yield insight and lead to business benefits. This paper reports the use of two approaches to modelling this business process: a commercially available modelling tool, ICL ProcessWise Workbench; and object‐oriented qualitative analysis (OOQA) and artificial neural network process modelling (ANNPM) developed by the authors. The ICL software proved excellent at initial process mapping, but required high skill levels for the detailed modelling. The use of OOQA captures significant information, and supports development of object‐oriented (OO) management information systems. The ANNPM proved capable of being used to predict engineering design office “response‐to‐tender” duration, resource, and costs.