Reference model design: An approach and its application

The main idea of reference modelling is to reuse business knowledge to create efficient business processes to be deployed inside an organisation. Reference models provide a set of generally accepted recommended practices. One of the management challenges facing today's organisations involves the development and reuse of business process reference models. We present a reference model design approach with a focus on a business process merging phase. Process merging is an approach that brings together several business process models with the objective to create a new model. We base our findings on a case study of three big Slovenian companies from the metal industry sector.