Communication Workflow Perspective on Engineering Work

Information technology can only support concurrent engineering if engineering works are well understood. The prevailing approach to do this is process modeling. We found, however, that traditional process modeling techniques such as IDEF0 obscure some aspects of human works, such as communication, collaboration, coordination, client-worker relations and client satisfaction and suggest an idealized, problem free view on the engineering works. We find that the communication workflow approach addresses these problems. In the paper we provide the theoretical background of this approach and compare a tool that implements it Action Workflow to traditional IDEF0 modeling approach. We found that the observation of the workflow loops between customers and performers provides a good overview of what is going on and enables the study of optimization and paralelisation of the works while at the same time maintaining and improving the quality of the services and client satisfaction.