AI tools for business-process modeling

For more than a decade, artificial intelligence techniques have served as critical building blocks for cutting edge business applications. Knowledge based systems (KBS) in particular have helped numerous Fortune 1000 companies solve pressing business problems-everything from scheduling their manufacturing operations to managing their investment portfolios. AI has helped many companies improve productivity and reduce costs to meet the demands of today's competitive global economy. Today, business management itself is undergoing fundamental change. For the past several years, business process reengineering (BPR) has become the watchword. This move to rethink and redesign the way a company works aims at further boosting productivity and cutting costs. No wonder then that business managers worldwide are turning to explicit KBS techniques, long proven to achieve the very goals of BPR, to model change. The first wave of AI based tools and applications for business process modeling (BPM) is just hitting the shore. Organizations such as IBM, EDS, the US Army, and Swiss Bank are among the first to adopt AI for BPM. Some are using traditional KBS tools such as ART*Enterprise and ProKappa, while others are turning to ReThink, the first AI tool designed specifically for BPM.