Best practices of business process improvement: towards a representation on top of the Quintessence kernel

Abstract

PurposeOrganizational process improvement plays an important role for sustaining business in a competitive environment. Therefore, enterprise leaders are increasingly prone to adopt business process improvement (BPI) practices. However, organizations are unable to implement formal and reusable solutions, representing a gap between academic research and practical use. In addition, companies adopt discipline-dependent solutions, lacking BPI representations of best practices applicable to all organizational divisions. This paper aims to propose some constructs on top of the Quintessence kernel for representing the practice systematic development of the BPI in the BPI lifecycle and we conduct two case studies in a multinational company.Design/methodology/approachA quantitative research design was adopted for recognizing gaps in previous approaches and identifying best BPI practices. Subsequently, characterization of practices and activities are represented based on a unified definition model and the Quintessence kernel. Finally, two case studies are developed for applying the solution.FindingsThe formal representation is applicable to multiple disciplines in organizational environments. Besides, the sub-alphas (abstract level progress health attribute) states and the work products resulting from each activity completion criteria evidence the health and progress accomplished during the practice execution.Originality/valueThe practice representation serves as a formal, graphical, reusable and multidiscipline guide compiling activities and tasks for systematically developing BPI during the radical/incremental improvement lifecycle.