Business Process Management Cases Vol. 2 | 2021
Tracking Energy Efficiency Performance at Clean Energy Solutions
Abstract
(a) \n \nSituation faced: Buildings and housing account for a significant percentage of global energy demands. However, building projects often suffer from deviations between planning and reality. Building Information Modeling (BIM) has lately been extended to cover the whole building project life cycle, but the heterogeneity of supporting software, the differing procedures of the companies involved, and buildings’ individuality hinder seamless collaboration among the parties, making it difficult to trace the impact of decisions on energy efficiency. \n \n \n \n \n(b) \n \nAction taken: Adaptive Case Management (ACM) is a methodology used to handle flexible business processes based on the achievement of business goals during a project, without defining strict process models. This chapter presents the first results of applying business architecture principles to ACM that uses domain-specific BIM tools for the content analysis that supports energy efficiency tracking throughout the project’s lifecycle. \n \n \n \n \n(c) \n \nResults achieved: Defining business actions and rules by using natural language patterns, along with the ontology entities (i.e., business concepts and their relationships), enable stakeholders to formalize a unique description of terms used and how they are related. This formalization is enacted with minimum IT involvement, which is covered by the initial system setup, leading to fully transparent project management. \n \n \n \n \n(d) \n \nLessons learned: One of the first steps in the approach presented here is the formalization of the business information model by means of a business ontology that describes all business entities. We realized that business users with many years of experience require several iterations of reviewing the value streams to identify the entities involved in an unambiguous way. However, these multiple iterations were an essential benefit in achieving a common terminology.