Simulation Support for Organizational Coordination

Redesigning organizational processes and their coordination often involves the construction of conceptual and empirical models of these processes and change alternatives. Modeling activities can be very time consuming, and time is a scarce resource. Especially constructing the simulation component of the empirical model involves a lot of effort. This paper describes a support tool that dramatically facilitates the transition from a conceptual model to a simulation model. The requirements of this tool and its prototype implementation as an Arena template are highlighted. A real case example shows the prototype in action. Modern organizations find themselves in a changing, demanding environment [5]. Organizations are subject to a constant need to adapt their structures, processes, and technologies in order to meet new demands from their environment [3]. Reorganizing can be pragmatically defined as the process of dividing processes into tasks and subsequently distributing (groups of) tasks and related responsibilities among one or more individuals or groups. In order to guide and monitor the process as a whole, these tasks, often carried out in parallel, have to be coordinated. Hence, a need to reorganize processes implies a need to reorganize the coordination of these processes. ‘Coordination’ usually signifies the process of bringing separate entities into synergy ensuring that they function together. The notion of coordination addressed in this paper concerns the structuring and adjustment of activities in organizations. We refer to this as organizational coordination. Organizational coordination is widely discussed in the literature on organization design, see e.g. [6,8,10]. To support redesigning organizational coordination, we propose an approach, called dynamic modeling. (For an