Reengineering business processes is considered by many researchers to be indispensable in order to survive and prosper in today's competitive world. International trade has received some academic attention as an application of Business Process Reengineering. A major issue in international trade is due to problems pertaining to mutual-trust between trading parties without a prior trading relationship. Professor Lee advocates a new concept called electronic trade scenario to bridge the disparity. He uses Documentary Petri Nets as a representation language for the electronic trade scenarios.
This thesis, on one hand, experiences the Business Process Reengineering project through a solid example -- GT3, a simplified Documentary Credit Procedure in international trade. Some of the currently available techniques and technologies being used in Business Process Reengineering are explored, and are used to analyse our GT3 model. Then GT3 is modelled by a graphical representation language called Linear Documentary Petri Net (LDPN). We obtain LDPN by modifying Professor Lee's Documentary Petri Net. A simulator written in SIMSCRIPT II.5 is given to execute GT3 for the purpose of demonstrating workflows among the parties involved.
On the other hand, a partially finished software tool which can be used to augment the process of Business Process Reengineering for international trade is presented. With this tool, users can design a new trade scenario and make modifications on existing scenarios. Then, the corresponding workflows within that particular scenario are simulated automatically. This software tool is written in SIMSCRIPT II.5 and GEMA. Evaluation of our implementation shows that it provides full environment support for running simulation, it is correct in implementation and it is feasible to ease the design and modification of trade scenarios for international trade.