CONSTRUCTION BUSINESS PROCESS AUTOMATION USING WORKFLOW TECHNOLOGY

This paper presents the core technology of Construction Business Process Automation to model and automate construction business processes. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) and Automation (BPA) have been recognized as one of the important aspects in construction business management. However, BPR requires a lot of efforts to identify, document, implement, execute, maintain, and keep track thousands of business processes to deliver a project. Moreover, existing BPA technologies used in existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems do not lend themselves to effective scalability for construction business process management. Application of Workflow and Object Technologies would be quite effective in implementing a scalable enterprise application for construction community. This paper present the technologies and methodologies for automating construction business processes by addressing how: 1) Automated construction management tasks are developed as software components, 2) The process modeling is facilitated by dragging-and dropping task components in a network, 3) Raising business requests and instantiating corresponding process instances are delivered, and 4) Business process instances are executed by using workflow technology based on real-time simulation engine. This paper presents how the construction business process automation is achieved by using equipment reservation and cancellation processes simplified intentionally.