Risk Description Augmenting a Business Process Model

Across industry, government, and military, an increase in risk and uncertainty of market effects has stimulated innovations in risk identification and management. Complex distributed systems and enterprises are faced with related challenges, including data configuration of business processes. With disruptions to product and service supply chains etc., data on past decisions, prior knowledge, and outcomes are analyzed to improve the success of timely risk responses and mitigation. This paper describes an innovation to a methodology for identifying sources of risk and merging them with risk descriptions of subject matter experts in a business process model. In particular, this methodology aids in the identification of sources of risk and related causal relationships, enabling users to create defense mechanisms prior to the occurrence of supply chain disruptions. The unique new focus of this paper is the IDEF3 business process model used to capture precedence and causality relations. The approach is demonstrated with an example of a business process of an industrial paint shop. Future efforts will merge IDEF models 1, 2, and 3 for identifying and addressing sources of risk.