PMT: Modeling Enterprise Operations and Organizations

Enterprise environments are complex and multidisciplinary. As the market competition becomes more and more relentless, business companies must keep adapting their current processes to the new needs of the market. During the adaptation process, enterprises may not have any experience with the new business needs. Many enterprise models from different perspectives have been proposed to facilitate this adaption process and reduce risks. However, due to the complexity of the enterprise environment, none of them takes all needed enterprise elements into consideration. A uniform approach that deals with different elements of an enterprise is needed in order to model all elements and analyze their effects on enterprise operations. Inspired by Galbraith’s information processing view of organizations and the extant modeling work of project organizations, in this paper we propose a unique model of enterprise called PMT that can be used to analyze enterprise operations and their interactions with market demands. Market demand as an independent variable and enterprise capacity (organization, processes and resources) are modeled computationally and the relations between them are captured. In this paper, the background and the major concepts of the PMT model are introduced and an application example demonstrated to show the effectiveness of the PMT model.