| Information technology can only support concurrent engineering if engineering
works are well understood and documented. The prevailing approach to do
this is process modeling. We found, however, that traditional process modeling
techniques obscure some aspects of human works, such as communication,
collaboration, coordination, client-worker relations and client satisfaction.
Particularly in the field of facility management, the latter is particularly
important. We find that the Action Workflow approach addresses these problems.
In the paper we provide the theoretical background of this approach, compare
it to traditional IDEF0 and IDEF3 activity modeling approach and demonstrate
its use by modeling facility management. We found that the observation
of the workflow loops provides a good overview of what is going on and
enables the study of optimization and paralelisation of the works and in
the same time maintain and improve the quality of the services and client
satisfaction. |
