A framework for Business Process Re-engineering to reduce the number of processes - a case study of National Blood Transfusion Services

Abstract

Blood Donation and Blood Transfusion Services play a vital role in saving people's lives. It is a known concern that the blood donation process usually consumes a lot of time and effort from both donors and medical staff. This issue is present, mainly due to the absence of a concrete and precise information system. If such a systems is implemented it could have the ability to allow donors and blood donation centers to communicate efficiently and collaborate with each other to minimize the time and effort required for the blood donation process. Besides, most blood banks work in isolation and are not integrated with other blood donation centers, which affect and degrade the quality of overall blood donation and blood transfusion services. This work aims at developing a standard framework named as “One Blood” based on business process re-engineering concepts, cloud storage services, and web application development technologies. This paper comprehensively describes the conceptual framework based on a case study of National Blood Transfusion Services in Sri Lanka. As a result, several pitfalls, highly critical processes, and points of failure were identified, which needs to be redefined. Improving the workflows and organizing the processes was conducted by the application of BPR concepts followed by the proposed framework. To further amplify the application of BPR two additional verticals namely Process Re-Organization and Radical Redesign was aligned with the Process Re-engineering phase. Process Re-Organization performs the comparing and contrasting of manual and systematic approaches while Radical Redesign enables the chance to leverage IT related technologies to achieve integration and automation of processes. The outcome of this research was presented as a cloud-based centralized web solution for the NBTS using the One Blood System by the integration of all of these concepts and technologies.