At the moment I am working in a medium-sized company with the modeling of existing processes. On the whole, this works quite well for many business processes. I only have problems with the machines. In production, the machines are ultimately important for quality, efficiency and effectiveness. They must be "built into" the processes. So far I haven't found much in the literature on the subject. Can you give me any hints or help on this?
I can give some examples of how I approached this situation. In the 1990s I worked for the HP MDD division. We had 3-D CAD products for mechanical engineers and a PLM product with a workflow module. I was a developer on the workflow module, did process automation consulting with customers and spent over 3 years on workflow standards with the WfMC and OMG.
The approach that worked in many situations was to have a task that reflected a machining/manufacturing step in the machining process. The successful conclusion of that task was often recorded in one of 2 ways: either a person entered something in a system tacking the completion or sensors would automatically note the completion. There was often a series of tasks to cover the steps involved in completing an inventoried part. Testing tasks for insuring quality are also inserted as a gate to mark an approved batch of parts/products, especially in a regulated industry such as medical devices.
The solution would then involve creating an integration to the systems tracking manufacturing step completion and/or quality testing results. The data from the other systems is used in a branching task to direct the process forward or to deal with unacceptable parts/products. In some cases it will not be possible to automate some tests or quality controls and a person will need to approve to move the process forward.
When parts/products are manufactured in batches or lots the standard approach is to have a separate process instance associated with each lot. My experience has that these processes have many parallel and concurrent tasks.
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