Systematizing Business Process Redesign Initiatives with the BPR:Assessment Framework

Abstract

Business process redesign (BPR) has emerged as a widely accepted practice within organizations for delivering better products and services and ensuring measurable benefits. Despite the adoption of BPR, it largely remains the result of a creative process and there is a lack of approaches for evaluating the potential impact of a BPR method before investing in its implementation. This means that BPR initiatives are selected based on ‘black-box’ generic options that are not explicitly tailored to the culture, structure, and existing processes of the organization. This paper aims to address this gap by introducing the BPR: Assessment Framework, a conceptual model based on Design Science Research Process (DSRP). The framework is intended to assess the BPR capacity of process models based on their plasticity and external quality. The usability of the framework is presented in the following manner: (a) through the demonstration of the framework using a data-intensive workflow optimization method as an end-to-end paradigm, and (b) the BPR capability assessment of 15 business process models from literature, to better demonstrate the benefits of omitting ineligible models prior to BPR application. The categorization of the redesign capability of models was based on a tested cluster analysis method using the k-means algorithm. Based on the findings, a considerable number of process models proved to be either overly constrained for the application of redesign heuristics or did not possess the required external quality to be redesigned. The contribution of the approach lies in the fact that the framework can also be extended to apply systematic BPR to eligible BPs. The framework can serve as a reliable measurement of the redesign capacity of candidate process models and as an essential part of a systematic methodology for increased BPR effectiveness.