Abstract
Business process improvement (BPI) is of high priority for practitioners. But especially the most value-adding phase in a BPI project, namely the “act of improvement”, is insufficiently supported despite the many existing methods and techniques. Until now, it is largely unclear as to what degree existing BPI techniques support each other and are interrelated with one another. Thus, the purpose of this paper is to investigate the functional interdependencies between BPI techniques to get a better understanding for the beneficial synergies between the BPI techniques and to provide a basis for purposefully combining them within projects. Based on the functional interdependencies, a graphical “Functional Interdependency Map” is developed and its usability demonstrated in an experiment. The paper is valuable for academics and practitioners alike because the impact of BPI on organizational performance is high.
Highlights
New technologies have tremendously reshaped the service sector in recent years (Beatson et al, 2007; Noh et al, 2016)
The case study – used for the experiment – was based on a real Business process improvement (BPI) project that was conducted by the authors of this study in cooperation with a financial service provider in the automobile industry and focused the document management process
The map enabled participants to understand the beneficial interdependencies between BPI techniques (PEOU 1) and it was perceived as easy to read at the same time (PEOU 4)
Summary
New technologies have tremendously reshaped the service sector in recent years (Beatson et al, 2007; Noh et al, 2016). Thereby, in times of “Industry 4.0”, even more and more manufacturing companies complement their product portfolio by “smart services” (e.g., predictive maintenance) to achieve competitive advantage (Acatech, 2016; Herterich et al, 2015; Pöppelbuß, 2018) Against this background, Business Process Improvement (BPI) (cf Harrington, 1991) ranks high on the agenda of CIOs (cf Acatech, 2016; Charles, 2017; Harmon & Garcia, 2020) as companies are engaged in the integration of digital technologies with their business processes to assure sustainable customer satisfaction (Gimpel et al, 2018; Gimpel & Röglinger, 2015). Some examples are “business process improvement (BPI)” (Harrington, 1991; Page, 2015), “business process redesign” (Davenport & Short, 1990; Kettler et al, 2019), “business (process) re-engineering (BPR)” (Hammer, 1990; Johnston, 2012; Sudha & Kavita, 2019), “core process redesign” (Al‐Hudhaif, 2009; Kaplan & Murdock, 1991), or “continuous improvement process” (Deming, 2000; Gisi, 2018; Imai, 1986; Yankelevitch & Kuhl, 2015) just to mention a few
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