A Cost-Object Model for Activity Based Costing Simulation of Business Processes

The achievement of business goals is heavily affected by the capability of enterprises to design, enforce and govern business processes. The dynamism of the market requires business goals to be constantly tuned, thus obliging the enterprise to continuously re-design processes. The cost for process re-engineering may be not negligible, if we consider that it may require several refinement steps and that tuning processes on-the-job may impair regular business activities. To this end, there is a growing interest towards tools that simulate the processes´ performance before they get actually enforced. In this paper we propose a novel business process simulator which makes use of a cost-object resource model to allow for Activity Based Costing (ABC) analysis of the simulation results. The simulator works with business processes modelled in the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) and exploits the rigor of the Colored Petri Nets´ (CPNets) formalism. A case study test has been conducted on a prototype implementation and related results are presented.