Applications of business process simulation and lean techniques in British Telecommunications PLC

Business processes are increasingly key to the success of companies in the service industry. It is important that these processes are designed and maintained to deliver the most cost effective and efficient results. Simulation is being used in conjunction with other techniques to improve the performance of BT's processes, to evaluate new ideas and to plan operational resource requirements. The examples in this paper discuss firstly, the use of Value Stream Analysis (VSA) to identify inefficiencies in business processes and how simulation is used to evaluate improvement plans/develop future business scenarios derived from this, and secondly how simulation is used to match available resources to workloads.