Being the first to enter a new market typically brings various competitive advantages such as a dominant market share. This increasing pressure to decrease time to market requires the integration of the development process. Miller and Davis describe a system that analyzes the process ramifications of laboratory-scale chemistry. In this paper, we expand the methodology to include the automatic, hierarchical generation and evaluation of alternative processes. These alternative process topologies are generated by abstracting the initial and final states connected with each function. These state descriptions can be used either directly or merged to allow generation of more innovative alternatives. For example, reformulating A-to-B-to-C as A-to-C allows the generation of alternatives not containing state B. The various sets of state descriptions are used for an exhaustive means-ends query of the database to generate alternative sets of functions, which in turn lead to alternative process topologies.