IDEF9000 - A modelling technique for redesigning business processes controlled by ISO 9001

The need to continuously improve operations within manufacturing enterprises has never been greater. Whether striving for manufacturing excellence or simply to stay ahead of competition operations managers are faced with challenging targets to make manufacturing systems more lean and productive. While these change agents make improvements to their manufacturing systems they must also ensure that, if the enterprise is certified to the ISO 9001 standard for quality management systems, the redesign activities take into account impacts on the quality system and its documentation. Also with the 3-year transition period to comply to the latest version of ISO 9001:2000 coming to an end soon, companies which have not given the processbased aspects of a quality system due consideration must act now. Much of the development in the field of quality management has tended to focus on the design and documentation of quality management systems without taking the business processes of an organisation into account. Only with the 2000 version of the standard has ISO genuinely addressed the need for companies to become more process-based. This requirement, which should make companies being more aware about its critical business processes, comes without any real support from ISO of how to establish a model of business processes or future redesign respectively. On the other hand pusiness process related literature has recognised the need for process-based quality systems for some time. There is however limited guidance on the design of business processes considering ISO 9001 requirements. Companies that redesign their organisational structures and apply comprehensive frameworks such as ARIS or GRAI usually have a different set of business objectives and consider that an ISO 9001 certification is not one of the main drivers. From a literature review and a series of case studies the authors concluded that current approaches to the design of quality systems have some key weaknesses and what seems to be missing is a modelling approach which does not necessarily document procedures and instructions but supports the modelling of business processes and establishes the links to the requirements of the standard. This would make clear the links between the standard and the parts of the process, which is essential when redesigning the process or when dealing with a change to the standard. This paper discusses the principles of a new modelling technique called IDEF9000 which takes a systems view of a business process and allows the modelling of activities, functional relationships and data. Developed from the original IDEF0 modelling technique, IDEF9000 uses an extended syntax and semantics to identify the links to the ISO 9001 quality standard and visually highlights them for redesign. For the development of IDEF9000 and the criteria which this modelling technique has to address in order to show the requirements of ISO 9001 a review into what a business process represents leads to the following. A business process transforms inputs into useful and effective outputs, starts and ends with the customer, focuses on goals, can be measured to allow feedback and process improvements, flows horizontally using a hierarchical structure, crosses organisational (functional) boundaries and requires resources to transforms inputs into outputs. On this basis a further review of the ISO 9001 standard identified that the requirements of ISO 9001 need to be modelled as activities, information and their flows. 3 However, in order to satisfy the needs of the change agents to see which elements of a process need special attention during redesign, the criteria needed extension. The full paper will discuss the criteria for such a modelling technique in order to demonstrate the links with ISO 9001. For validation purposes the research focused on a particular operating business process called the Fulfil Order Process. With the extended syntax and semantics of IDEF9000 the modeller can graphically identify all activities and flows which are controlled by ISO 9001 at all levels of detail in a process model. A set of guidelines for redesigning a business process will be presented which places the emphasis on assessing existing or amended activities and flows controlled by ISO 9001 for compliance to the quality standard. During a redesign project, the process model should be checked as to whether activities and flows are needed, and whether activities can be relocated, aggregated or performed in parallel with the focus being on maintaining compliance to ISO 9001. The enhancements in IDEF9000 and its method of use should be seen as an addition to the existing IDEF0 methodology. The paper describes the method and its application in a case study conducted at a small and medium-sized enterprise.