In the business world’s race for companies to perform faster, better and cheaper, Business Process Management (BPM) and Workflow have been launched as the ‘Holy Grail’ to success.

Many of the BPM vendors are developing templates and frameworks (best practices) covering traditional industry verticals such as finance, manufacturing, telecoms, and government sectors. The maritime and offshore industries are faced with the same fierce competition as the rest of the business world, and must also continually improve performance.

But, best practices from other industry verticals are not readily adapted to these industry segments. The workforce of the maritime and offshore industries consists of highly qualified knowledge workers undertaking complex design work spanning a long time frame. Their business processes are typically concurrent, multi-discipline, iterative and highly complex. Such organisations pose severe challenges to process management and workflow implementation supporting their best practices.

Process categories and workflow
What are processes? The question may sound trivial, but one would probably get a different answer each time the question is posed. One way to categorise business processes can be:

• System-to-system processes
• Person-to-system processes
• Person-to-person processes

To generalise, one may say that system-tosystem processes are of low complexity and short duration, while person-to-person processes are complex and span a long time frame.

A system-to-system process may involve an application-to-application data transfer, such as an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) transaction, while a complex process may involve several applications and people, such as a design process. A data transaction is typically of a short duration. During the person-to-person process (e.g. a design project), a group of people collaborate and share knowledge and experience. The design process can take months to complete.

In between these two categories, we find the person-to-system category. These are often defined by repeatable processes with few variations between instances. It is usually state-based, involving person-to-system intervention at specific steps, while the remaining steps may be automated through applications.

Catering for knowledge workers
Depending on the business context, one usually finds that the majority of cases to be handled in a given business process follow an expected pattern. This is typically around 70–80 per cent of cases (the 80–20 rule) which, because of procedural efficiency, consume about 20 per cent of the available resources (figure on next page). The problem is that the remaining 20 per cent of cases usually consume 80 per cent of the available resource. Some of those cases can be handled through well understood business rules, while others require a greater degree of collaboration.

Often an enterprise will find that a small percentage of the total cases (the two uppermost tiers in the pyramid) consume a larger share of resources and can have a huge impact on the profit-ability. Reducing these two tiers in the pyramid through, for example, process standardisation can have a big impact on the business bottom line.

However, reducing or eliminating the unique problems or the problems which require exception handling may not be achievable or even practical in the real world. This will generally be true for processes involving knowledge workers (the person-to-person process category). When knowledge workers interact with customers, they seldom follow a strict pattern or behaviour. The real challenge for a business process framework will be to support these knowledge workers in an efficient and flexible manner.

The case distribution depicted to the left in the figure above may well be typical within the traditional industry verticals targeted by most BPM vendors; however, for the part of the maritime industry involving engineering and design (knowledge workers), this picture is not valid. Rather, the typical case distribution in a commercial ship design process would look more like the pyramid to the right. In a commercial ship design process, one may not have a core pattern to follow which does not require collaboration or interaction with the ship owner (client). If one embarks on a large process improvement and workflow integration project with the maritime engineering and design industry without this picture in mind, failure is to be expected.

Process centric vs data centric integration
Most BPM vendors take a data or application centric approach to solve their client’s process integration needs. This will be a suitable approach for the system-to-system and to some extent also the more complex person-to-system categories. These vendors usually offer a comprehensive toolbox for data and system integration. However, the same data centric systems do not support person-to-person process integration very well. This process category is better supported by process-centric integration type of products.

Person-to-person processes require detailed knowledge about the business process. Because of the human involvement, a robust scheme for exception handling is required. It is also crucial that the exception handling can be managed inside the process framework.

Collaboration and workflow
As outlined in the previous sections, the person-to-person processes involving knowledge workers pose a huge challenge for the process framework. One solution is to introduce the concept of Collaboration enabled Processes Management (CPM) bringing together workflow and collaboration support systems within the same process framework. This concept is particularly suited for supporting the knowledge worker and person-to-person business processes.

CPM introduces advantages to the process framework in order to support the knowledge worker. The exception handling can be left to be resolved through collaboration. This again makes the task easier for the process analyst. The process activities need only include the main line of the process together with the routine exception situations, leaving the handling of the non-routine exceptions to be resolved through the process framework collaboration tool. This leads to simpler and clearer process templates and reduced process analysis time.

When the collaboration is part of the process framework, the process engine can keep an event log of all collaborations triggered by the users. Each collaboration event can be logged in detail with a reason, participants involved, start and end time. Additionally, the outcome (decision) of the collaboration can be recorded. Through that logging mechanism, user-initiated conversations become an integral part of the history of the process. A systematic analysis of such exception traces can lead to enrichment of the process definition by analysing the most repetitive ones. An enterprise’s ability to learn from past performance and quickly improve the business process will constitute a competitive advantage in today’s business environment.

Leaving the exceptions to be handled by the knowledge worker, and not by a business rule engine, will empower the worker. An empowered knowledge worker will feel much more comfortable and perform better in such an environment. People management and satisfaction is an important issue often neglected when integrating systems and people, and a key ingredient to corporate success.

Best Engineering Practice and knowledge transfer
Having recognised that knowledge assets are rapidly becoming their most precious source of competitive advantage, a large number of organisations are now attempting to transfer best practices. Yet best practices still remain stubbornly immobile.

“Why don’t best practices spread?” In its simplest way, while still complicated, sharing best practice between two knowledge workers is: One person in the role of ‘Donor’ – the other one being ‘Recipient’. Both of them act in their own working environment catering to what is on their personal agendas (contexts). The reasons for not being able to transfer Best Engineering Practice are mainly caused by human nature. Different barriers impeding knowledge transfer are part of the natural knowledge sharing process between humans. ICT systems are not exposed to the same barriers.

By introducing Best Engineering Practice as a concept, DNV Software has realised that integration of systems and people will only be successful if you are able to monitor and control the actual processes involving both the people and the systems. By its nature, software enforces structure on design organisations. Over time, technical software investments often result in safeguarding engineering knowledge and should therefore be considered a very important part of a company’s intellectual capital. The challenge is to create frameworks that enable freedom of content while maintaining a well-defined structure. Such frameworks allow designers to focus their creativity on content – the design itself – rather than on infrastructure and technology-related issues.

Commercial shipbuilding and design
Over the past 30 years, the Republic of Korea has emerged as the world-leading shipbuilding nation. In 2005, Korea produced 44 per cent of the world’s commercial ship tonnage, surpassing Japan for the third year in a row. Over this time, South Korea has developed highly skilled engineers producing some of the world’s most advanced ship designs in a highly efficient manner.

However, competition from emerging low-cost shipbuilding nations such as China and Vietnam will force the Korean shipyards to become even more efficient to stay ahead of their competitors. ERP solutions are being introduced on a large scale, including process improvement initiatives. These are only some of the means that Korean yards have taken on in order to improve their performance. Experience from some of the ERP implementations has revealed to the yards that these bundled solutions do not support their knowledge workers very well. One of the reasons is that these solutions typically take a data or application centric integration approach, offering little or no support for exception handling and collaboration. The second largest yard in Korea, Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering Ltd. (DSME), launched a project in 2005 with the objective to develop a workflow production system supporting their engineers in their daily work. The scope included the three work processes:

• Vibration Analysis & Design
• Basic Structural Design
• Marketing Design

At the time of writing, all three work processes have been success-fully implemented based on the Brix Foundation, and are now in production at the yard.

Supporting Best Engineering Practices at the shipyard
The implementation of the engineering support system at DSME is utilising the Brix Foundation developed by DNV Software. The Brix Foundation is based on a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and consists of several parts, see the figure above.

The three DSME processes which are part of the implementation project consist of both person-to-system and person-toperson processes. In the Basic Structural Design process, the project manager (PM) instantiates the project based on a common project template (best practice). The PM then carries out the activity scheduling (defining the key events or milestones) and assign resources to the different roles defined in the template. The assigned engineers are automatically notified about which tasks to carry out and when these tasks must be completed. The engineer is provided with a pre-defined process template for the activity to be carried out, which can depend on the context (for example the role of the engineer or the state of the process).

Document services
It is essential that the engineers have easy access to all important information based on the current context. In addition to data stored in databases, the engineer will also work with documents. The documents which are part of the process flow will appear as an integrated part of the application. This is made possible by interfacing directly with the enterprise document management system or through the Brix Document Service.

Flexibility
‘Ad hoc’ workflow may be introduced as part of the solution in order to increase end user flexibility. As an example, the engineer which works on the Basic Structural Design process always has to carry out the Rule Scantling activity. For this purpose, a set of calculation tools (applications) is provided by the classification societies at hand. For the main stream of projects (designs), these applications are sufficient. But from time to time, a design needs to be developed or studied in more detail. For this purpose, the engineer has to carry out a more detailed analysis using an application based on the Finite Element Method (FEM). During the process analysis phase, we realised that this behaviour is an exception to the normal flow. Rather than modelling this activity into the standard flow of the Basic Structural Design process, we allow the user to dynamically add a sub-process to the activity of the running process when a more detailed analysis is required. The user can choose from a set of pre-defined templates covering the majority of expected exceptions. In this way, we keep the standard flow as clean as possible, and leave the knowledge worker to decide when a detailed analysis is required. It is important to realise that the ad hoc changes only apply to the instantiated process template (running process); the original template is not changed.

Learning
The changes are saved together with the process for later evaluation and experience feedback. If one encounters many similar changes to the same process, the process owner may choose to incorporate these as part of the template process.

Collaboration
During the analysis phase of the Marketing Design process at DSME, we soon realised that it would be very difficult to represent the process with all exceptions in a workflow context. There were simply too many exceptions and roles involved. Rather than trying to fit all participants into one common template process, we introduced the concept of collaboration described earlier. By introducing a collaboration mechanism as part of the framework, we were able to define a much simpler process template. The deviations to the template flow are left to be resolved through the built-in collaboration mechanism instead of explicitly modelled in the flow. The mechanism is simple but effective: by introducing a messaging scheme which is part of the framework, the engineer can request information at any time from any workflow participant. The messaging conversations are logged and kept as part of the process history for later analysis and learning. Other collaboration mechanisms – such as user notification in the workflow inbox, by email, or collaboration services like Microsoft Live Communication Server – are also utilised where appropriate.

Brix Foundation

Brix Workflow Manager
The main design goals when developing the Brix Workflow Manager functionality were to develop a system able to handle complex and interactive person-to-person work processes involving multiple applications and long-running transactions.

Brix Explorer
Brix Explorer is responsible for hosting the yard’s applications which are part of its engineering work process. The application related to the chosen activity is invoked automatically. Information and operation of the application is based on the context, for example the chosen activity and its status. The role of the user may also be used to introduce context switching, thereby tailoring the information at the user’s hand even more (Explorer templates).

Brix Project Manager
The Brix Foundation has recently been considerably enhanced with the objective to better support engineering work processes, the latest additions being Brix Project Manager with functionality supporting project portfolios including planning and scheduling, and the Brix Rule System.

Conclusion
When working with knowledge workers and knowledge intensive organi-sations, it is important that BPM implementation projects adopt a process centric approach. This will better support person-to-person processes commonly found n these types of organisations. The solution hould cater for flexibility while aintaining the necessary structure eeded for knowledge transfer and experience eedback. Equally important is to ealise knowledge stickiness and the uman barriers constraining effective nowledge sharing. Introducing the concept f Best Engineering Practice may rove valuable to improve knowledge ransfer and ultimately the performance.