Process Grammars: A Generative Approach to Process Redesign.

Organizations are under increasing pressure to redesign core organizational processes. This paper describes the ways in which the Process Handbook (Malone, Crowston, Lee, and Pentland, 1993) can be used to describe and redesign business processes. The Process Handbook is an electronic database of process descriptions and analysis tools. When completed, it will embody a large lexicon of process steps and constraints on the ways in which they can be combined. The Process Handbook can therefore be viewed as a kind of grammar for generating alternative process configurations. The example of a supply chain is used to illustrate the concepts.