Resources are elements of the organization that are used in the process. Resource has the following properties:

 name

 resource type

 description

organization item

 used in connectors

 used in process steps

 resource groups

 resource pools

 owned process steps

 owned connectors

 

Resource type can be material, personnel, machinery, stock, property or other. Resources usually belong to an organization item. Resources are used in process steps and connectors. For resources of type personnel, machinery, stock and property the following properties are used:

 amount available

 unit cost

 unit

 

Amount available specifies how many resources are available, e.g. there might be three salesmen, one office assistant and one technical support person in the sales office. For resources other than material, unit cost is the cost of using the resources for one time-based unit, e.g. salesman might cost £100 per one hour.

 

In addition to the properties mentioned above, the following properties apply only for material resources:

 store size

 ordering limit

 order size

 ordering cost

 ordering time

 

Material resources have a built-in storage to ease the modeling of storage handling for materials. Store size specifies the maximum amount of material that can be stored. When the amount of material in store drop below the ordering limit, a replenishment order will be sent. The amount of material ordered is specified by the order size. Each replenish order will take a certain time (ordering time) before ordered material is in the store and ordering will have a certain cost specified by ordering cost.

 

A resource can belong to several resource groups or pools and it can itself be either of them. A resource group is a collection of resources that are all allocated to that group, e.g. a manufacturing cell including two workers, a machine and some property could be a resource group. A resource pool is a collection of resources, which are substitutes for each other, so any free resource belonging to a certain resource pool can be used. An example of a resource pool could be called Management resources. All the human resources belonging to this pool can do managerial tasks and make management decisions. This pool could include e.g. a managing director and all the managers.

 

Resources are used in process steps and connectors. This allocation is done for material resources by indicating the number of units consumed in process step or connector. The resources of other type than material are allocated to process steps or connectors by specifying the number of resources needed. The specified amount of resources is reserved for a process step or connector during the whole processing time.

 

Owned process steps and connectors are the elements for which this person has been modeled as being the owner.