Business Process Management Research Research Articles

From zero to hero: ramp-up management as a new cross-cutting business process management capability

AbstractChanging business environments challenge and motivate organizations to transform. To remain competitive, organizations need to embrace these dynamics and make radical changes to how work is performed. Business process management (BPM) as a holistic management discipline offers mature methods and end-to-end management activities. However, it is subject to the tension between stability and change. While change through the improvement of existing business processes is well understood, the implementation and scaling of novel business processes have been neglected in BPM research. Hence, this paper proposes business process ramp-up management (BPRUM) as a new cross-cutting capability area for contemporary and future BPM and explores relevant sub-capabilities. Our work synthesizes insights from an exploratory interview study with 21 subject matter experts to advance the understanding of BPM as a corporate capability regarding the implementation and scaling of novel processes. As a result, this study illustrates how BPRUM adds to modern BPM and presents 40 action-oriented sub-capabilities that provide hands-on knowledge and practical guidance for effective BPRUM. Thereby, it serves as a foundation for further theorizing on process ramp-up and for structuring discussions among BPM practitioners.

Science Mapping the Research of Business Process Management: Patterns and Implications for Comparable Information Technology Fields

Business ethics, as a content of formal higher education, occupies This paper maps the research and maturity of the Business Process Management (BPM) scientific field by using existing literature reviews and bibliographic methods to formulate generalizable patterns and implications, which could be proposed for comparable, multidisciplinary Information Technology (IT) fields. By applying text mining to the corpus of BPM conference and journal papers, systematically selected from Scopus, generalizable drivers of BPM evolution and maturity are determined, including the proposal of implications for comparable IT fields. Results showed four literature clusters, which relate reasonably well with the BPM lifecycle and PDCA/PDSA cycle concepts. BPM and comparable research fields seem to be driven by the maturing of technological capabilities and organizational acceptance in the sectors in which they are heavily applied. This study comprehensively analyzes BPM journal articles and conference proceedings using bibliometric analysis to provide new research directions.

IoT-enriched event log generation and quality analytics: a case study

Abstract Modern technologies such as the Internet of Things (IoT) are becoming increasingly important in various fields, including business process management (BPM) research. An important area of research in BPM is process mining, which can be used to analyze event logs e.g., to check the conformance of running processes. However, the data ingested in IoT environments often contain data quality issues (DQIs) due to system complexity and sensor heterogeneity, among other factors. To date, however, there has been little work on IoT event logs, DQIs occurring in them, and how to handle them. In this case study, we generate an IoT event log, perform a structured data quality analysis, and describe how we addressed the problems we encountered in pre-processing.

Pathways to Greener Pastures: Research Opportunities to Integrate Life Cycle Assessment and Sustainable Business Process Management Based on a Systematic Tertiary Literature Review

Sustainable Business Process Management (BPM) is a research field that aims to improve the sustainability performance of organizations’ operations. With its focus on business processes, it has the potential to bring sustainability considerations from external reporting to the core of organizations. We present a systematic tertiary literature study to provide a catalog of existing literature reviews and primary work and to give a consolidated overview of the state and research needs of the field. We find that Sustainable BPM research has focused on modeling approaches and most of the work so far is largely conceptual, with a limited sustainability perspective. Based on these findings, we propose an integration of BPM and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), an established and rigorous method for sustainability analysis. We present research opportunities to show how both disciplines can synergize and leverage methods and techniques for business process automation and innovation to effectively improve the sustainability performance of organizations.

Cross-functional Business Processes as a new research object

Recent research in business process management has shown the negative impact of various kinds of barriers on the financial performance of the organization, arising from the inconsistency of the actions of individual business units. Academicians and practitioners develop proposals for creating a cross-functional team of employees within the company to eliminate such barriers. Despite the intensification of scientific research in the field of business process optimization in recent years, the task of improving accounting methods and analyzing the effectiveness of business processes remains relevant. The study used such methods of scientific knowledge as: observation, comparison, analysis, modeling, as well as a systematic approach. Data processing, their systematization and analysis were carried out using the MS Excel program. The scientific novelty of the work lies in the systematization of existing knowledge in management accounting and controlling business processes, the allocation of a new object of research — cross-functional business processes. The theoretical significance of the study is an improvement of the conceptual apparatus and methodology of cross-functional business processes management. Of practical importance are the system of indicators for evaluating the effectiveness of cross-functional business processes, recommendations for the implementation of management accounting and controlling systems for cross-functional business processes, as well as assessing their consistency based on a barrier map.

Transforming healthcare ecosystems through blockchain: Opportunities and capabilities for business process innovation

Blockchain is an unprecedented enabler and booster of business process innovation, especially in the healthcare sector. Nonetheless, its transformational potential has yet to be fully harnessed because of the challenges that digitalization has posed to Business Process Management (BPM) and the inherent complexity of the healthcare processes. Accordingly, through the ambidextrous BPM theoretical lenses, this paper investigates what are the main opportunities for Blockchain-driven healthcare process innovation and which BPM capabilities may unleash them. Two exploratory case studies were conducted to probe the Blockchain-driven process redesign: a case of exploitative BPM, focusing on drug logistics, and a case of explorative BPM, focusing on integrated home care. Our findings suggest that Blockchain may enable Healthcare innovation opportunities, such as the redesign of the information flow and the development of new forms of collaboration in the health ecosystem. In addition, the most relevant BPM capabilities to pursue such innovations were identified. These results integrate the BPM research stream and enhance the understanding of Blockchain-driven healthcare process innovation.

Business process redesign towards IoT-enabled context-awareness: the case of a Chinese bulk port

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to contribute to the extant literature about the co-evolvement of Business Process Management (BPM) and the Internet of Things (IoT) by proposing the IoT-enabled Context-aware BPM (IoT-CaBPM) framework to bridge from the IoT infrastructure to context-aware business processes.Design/methodology/approachMotivated by the “Three Waves” of BPM research, IoT-enabled context-awareness is, therefore, expected to be achieved for enhancing the business process design, which pilots a new wave of BPR (Business Process Redesign/Reengineering) to enable the business process coevolve with IoT and analytics. This paper reports an illustrative case study of BPR in a Chinese bulk port, one of the hub seaports that widely adopted IoT technologies over the last few years.FindingsThe IoT implementation and data analytics has increased the efficiency and improve the monitoring effectively. The proposed IoT-CaBPM framework availably helps to identify and match nodes of IoT devices, business decisions and analytic models in order to redesign a business process towards context-aware variability. As IoT is rapidly becoming the new dominant IT paradigm is moving towards mature implementation in various industries, the corresponding BPR must be planned and executed strategically for achieving better benefits.Originality/valueDespite some research extend BPM standard by integrating IoT devices as a sort of resources or report generically that the ports operations are affected by IoT, there is still a lack of layers from the IoT infrastructure to context-aware business processes. An industrial BPR case with business models in detail is also a lack for presenting the specific implications and effectiveness of the adoption of such technologies. This paper fills in this gap.

Exogenous Shocks and Business Process Management

Business process management (BPM) drives corporate success through effective and efficient processes. In recent decades, knowledge has been accumulated regarding the identification, discovery, analysis, design, implementation, and monitoring of business processes. This includes methods and tools for tackling various kinds of process change such as continuous process improvement, process reengineering, process innovation, and process drift. However, exogenous shocks, which lead to unintentional and radical process change, have been neglected in BPM research although they severely affect an organization’s context, strategy, and business processes. This research note conceptualizes the interplay of exogenous shocks and BPM in terms of the effects that such shocks can have on organizations’ overall process performance over time. On this foundation, related challenges and opportunities for BPM via several rounds of idea generation and consolidation within a diverse team of BPM scholars are identified. The paper discusses findings in light of extant literature from BPM and related disciplines, as well as present avenues for future (BPM) research to invigorate the academic discourse on the topic.

Influential Article Review - Process Based on Values Integrated Development of BPM Competence Development and Process Optimization: Project Asset Management

This paper examines business process management. We present insights from a highly influential paper. Here are the highlights from this paper: Business process management (BPM) is an important area of organizational design and an acknowledged source of corporate performance. Over the last decades, many approaches, methods, and tools have been proposed to discover, design, analyze, enact, and improve individual processes. At the same time, BPM research has been and still is paying ever more attention to BPM itself and the development of organizations’ BPM capability. Little, however, is known about how to develop an organization’s BPM capability and improve individual processes in an integrated manner. To address this research gap, we developed a planning model. This planning model intends to assist organizations in determining which BPM- and process-level projects they should implement in which sequence to maximize their firm value, catering for the projects’ effects on process performance and for interactions among projects. We adopt the design science research (DSR) paradigm and draw from project portfolio selection as well as value-based management as justificatory knowledge. For this reason, we refer to our approach as value-based process project portfolio management. To evaluate the planning model, we validated its design specification by discussing it against theory-backed design objectives and with BPM experts from different organizations. We also compared the planning model with competing artifacts. Having instantiated the planning model as a software prototype, we validated its applicability and usefulness by conducting a case based on real-world data and by challenging the planning model against accepted evaluation criteria from the DSR literature. For our overseas readers, we then present the insights from this paper in Spanish, French, Portuguese, and German.

Business Process Simulation on Procedural Graphical Process Models

Business process simulation marks an essential technique for analyzing business processes and for reasoning about process improvement. With first contributions dating back to the mid-1990s, computerized business process simulation has been a continuing research focus and is widely acknowledged as foundational to Business Process Management research and practice. Reviewing contributions to the field published between 1990 and 2018, the authors assess the state of research on business process simulation and develop an organizing overview of research contributions discussing simulation approaches, tool support, results visualization, use context, application purposes, and adoption barriers. Findings inform future research on business process simulation by discussing paths for behavioral research on the use of business process simulation, user requirements, and adoption barriers as well as complementary paths for design science research addressing limitations of present approaches and simulation tool support.

A Thematic Literature Review on Business Process Management

Business Process Management (BPM) is considered as a management approach that primarily focuses on analyzing and continuously improving business processes. It has been a key strategy adapted by organizations to manage their businesses successfully along with information technology. In the past few decades BPM has been one of the promising research areas. This paper adds knowledge to the existing research by answering following questions: (1) what is the status of BPM research domain? And (2) what are the possible future research directions on BPM? A thematic review was conducted focusing a series of literature on BPM which have been published between 2001 and 2020. The findings highlight that the integration of BPM into new digital innovations, such as process mining, is essential for an effective and efficient organization. More research on BPM and IT management needs to be conducted to support this integration between BPM and digital innovations.

Environmental Sustainability through Green Business Process Management

The climate change phenomenon, directly or indirectly, affects industries and nations. Governments and organizations have been challenged to identify their environmental impacts to address environmental sustainability issues. A promising, yet under-studied in this context, theme of information systems (IS) literature that has the potential to help with identifying, quantifying and managing environmental impacts is business process management (BPM). With its focus on continual process performance improvement, the capacity of BPM to contribute to Environmental Sustainability (ES) needs to be further explored. Yet, contributions from the BPM research community and the impact of these contributions appear to be fragmented. In this paper, we present a systematic literature review to explore BPM contributions to ES, with a focus on environmental performance indicators (EPIs) as well as relevant organizational factors related to ES and BPM. In doing so, we identify and explore ‘Green BPM’ contributions and suggest ways to advance BPM research in the context of ES.

Green BPM as a Business-Oriented Discipline: A Systematic Mapping Study and Research Agenda

Green Business Process Management (BPM) focuses on the ecological impact of business processes. This article provides a systematic mapping study of Green BPM literature to evaluate five attributes of the Green BPM research area: (1) scope, (2) disciplines, (3) accountability, (4) researchers and (5) quality control. The results allow developing a research agenda to enhance Green BPM as an approach for environmentally sustainable organizations. We rely on a dichotomy of knowledge production to present research directives relevant for both academics and practitioners in order to help close a rigor-relevance gap. The involvement of both communities is crucial for Green BPM to advance as an applied, business-oriented discipline.

Approaching Green BPM characterisation

AbstractSustainable development is a type of development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. Sustainability has recently become more and more important for businesses. This has led to what is known as Green BPM (Green business process management), in which sustainability is considered to be a business objective. The objective of this work was to carry out a systematic literature review in order to evaluate how the subject of Green BPM has evolved and how the term “Green BPM” has been conceptualised so as to propose a new definition compiled from those previously formulated; identify the impact of the incorporation of Green aspects into the BPM life cycle stages; and discover the impact of Green BPM research efforts by means of the PDCA (plan‐do‐check‐act) model, thus identifying (1) the goals that have been proposed when Green initiatives are carried out in BPM, (2) the context in which this has been applied, and (3) the performance indicators considered. Finally, we propose a new characteristic, Process Greenability, together with its subcharacteristics, in addition to identifying the relationship between these subcharacteristics and the indicators identified to make them measurable.

Structured literature review on business process performance analysis and evaluation

Knowledge of business process analysis instruments and methods enhance the possibility to quantify process management decisions and to achieve organizations' goals. While the amount of research on business process analysis and evaluation increases, there is a need to outline the intellectual structure of scientific research as embodied in business process scientific literature in order to define the streams of research. The purpose of this paper is to present actionable knowledge of business process performance analysis and evaluation, based on the framework, integrating business process research domains and levels of analysis. In order to establish a framework, integrating the domains of business process analysis, the research questions were formulated and the analysis of the scientific literature was carried out applying the method of structured literature review. Literature review was based on a research papers that were available through the EBSCO host, Academic search complete databases. References were searched using the keywords that are formed as combinations of words: business process, analysis, performance, evaluation. Research contributions, addressing the business process analysis topic, were selected by the keywords within the papers' title, abstract and in the keywords specified in the article. After the initial evaluation of 677 papers, 62 articles were selected for in-depth analysis. This paper contributes to the business process management research by proposing the framework to integrate various business process analysis research streams and highlighting exploratory potential areas for future inquiry.

Why do business processes deviate? Results from a Delphi study

Despite substantial investments in business process management (BPM), every organization experiences deviant processes, i.e., processes that show different behavior than intended. Thus, process deviance is an essential topic of BPM research and practice. Today, research on process deviance is mainly driven from a computer science perspective. IT-based methods and tools (e.g., deviance mining and prediction or compliance checking) detect process deviance by comparing log data from past process instances with normative process models or execution traces of currently running instances. However, requiring process models and event logs as input, existing approaches are expensive and limited to processes executed in automated workflow environments. Further, they can only detect process deviance, not explain why it occurs. Thus, knowledge about reasons for process deviance is immature. What is missing is a systematic exploration of reasons for process deviance. Against this backdrop, we compiled and structured reasons for process deviance based on a rating-type Delphi study with more than 30 experts from industry and academia. Thereby, we chose a process manager’s perspective as analytical lens, as process managers are familiar with and responsible for business processes end-to-end. We also analyzed the reasons’ importance for causing deviance in routine and nonroutine processes, two process types that capture the nature of processes in terms of variation and variety. Our results contribute to the descriptive knowledge on process deviance and serve as foundation for prescriptive research.

Business Process Management (BPM)

PurposeAlthough Business Process Management (BPM) is a critical issue and small- and medium-sized family firms (SMFFs) frequently adopt process organization, very little literature focuses on the processes by which family firms remain distinctive (Chrisman et al., 2016) or on their approach to BPM. The current research aims to fill this gap by analyzing dynamic companies’ attitudes to process-driven ability that concern exploitative as well as explorative processes. The purpose of this paper is to identify which kinds of dimensions may build an ambidextrous state in BPM in SMFFs, also favored by entrepreneurial IT capabilities and influenced by a stable but changeable context.Design/methodology/approachThe authors referred to vom Brocke et al.’s (2014) study as it allows a focus on BPM research in the context of SMFFs. Then, the authors adapted the framework to the context of SMFFs. In addition, an empirical analysis has been made for applying the framework’s principles on effective BPM requirements to SMFFs. In the research, the authors applied grounded theory, according to which observation and theorization are linked by circularity, as they represent moments being managed simultaneously. The theorization emerged in different moments of the empirical surveys, influencing the next data gathering and the data gathering was the object of a de-structured matching and analysis process.FindingsSpecific cultural and cognitive aspects, values and abilities affect the company behavior of SMFFs in terms of BPM, and this is influenced by the connection between the family and the business. Therefore, it confirms that the family is a missing variable in organizational research (Dyer, 2006) also in BPM. A good BPM permits the definition of business abilities of running the current processes, along with of acclimatizing the company to a changeable context. In regard to the exploitative and explorative strengths typical of organizational ambidexterity, the research favors, respectively, transactional excellence with a focus on net cost reduction and transformational excellence based on net revenue generation. This approach requires consideration of the difference between external and internal contingencies as well as of the different processes to manage. However, despite IT-based BPM tools and the new era of IT-based process thinking, technology appropriation is only one of our dimensions, and each dimension plays a role in good BPM behavior; only a combination of dimensions favors effective and flexible BPM.Research limitations/implicationsThe research contributes to the literature on BPM through theoretical implications, in particular two main implications. First, the research emphasizes the impact of familiness on good BPM practice. Family appears to be a missing variable in organizational research on BPM, even though familiness affects process specificity and mechanisms. Second, the research is based on certain category dimensions that characterize management models common in the literature, allowing the application of BPM in FFs by taking advantage of their confidence and adaptability. Limitations are related to different points of view on the model’s scope and design, the recipient and the research method.Practical implicationsThe research has two main practical implications, representing managerial potential, that improve the significance and originality of the research in internal and external contexts. In the internal context, this permits a new BPM mind-set.Originality/valueThe research is original for the following two reasons. First, when FF complexity grows and/or new organizational issues emerge, FFs are faced with two challenges: an increased number of complex processes to handle, along with a lack of IT-based BPM for organizational ambidexterity. In such a context, this research can suggest a solution. Second, the research is based on dimensions that have been widely characterized in general management models. For this reason, FFs may already be familiar with these dimensions. In addition, the model strongly valorizes the familiness impact on BPM development and takes into consideration the context awareness of the company.

IT ambidexterity for business processes: the importance of balance

PurposeIn highly dynamic industries, business processes require exploitation, i.e. activities that are associated with an increase in productivity through automation, standardization, integrated architectures, and the usage of existing IT resources. As a complementary capability, exploration is needed, i.e. the ability to flexibly implement new and innovative IT resources (Lee et al., 2015). The purpose of this paper is to use the concept of ambidexterity, which is researched intensively outside the domain of business processes (e.g. Gibson and Birkinshaw, 2004; Tang and Rai, 2014), to address this paradoxical trade-off within business processes.Design/methodology/approachThe paper follows a qualitative approach. A multiple case study comprising 11 interviews and additional document analysis in six organizations is conducted in the German energy sector to examine the proposed framework.FindingsThis paper shows the importance of balancing exploitative and explorative business process IT (BPIT) capabilities. The process-theoretical outcome of this study is the BPIT Capability Framework that provides explanation for the interaction between exploitation and exploration.Research limitations/implicationsThis study contributes to the understanding of how to build ambidextrous BPIT capabilities by explaining the underlying mechanisms for feedback loops that occur in cases of imbalance. The scope of the conducted study presents a limitation and thus future research is encouraged to further validate the findings of this paper.Originality/valueBy drilling down to the process level, this paper addresses the gaps that limited empirical studies have in business process management research (Recker and Mendling, 2015) and the focus on business processes that is lacking from the literature on organizational IT management (Gregory et al., 2015).

Event-based failure prediction in distributed business processes

Traditionally, research in Business Process Management has put a strong focus on centralized and intra-organizational processes. However, today’s business processes are increasingly distributed, deviating from a centralized layout, and therefore calling for novel methodologies of detecting and responding to unforeseen events, such as errors occurring during process runtime. In this article, we demonstrate how to employ event-based failure prediction in business processes. This approach allows to make use of the best of both traditional Business Process Management Systems and event-based systems. Our approach employs machine learning techniques and considers various types of events. We evaluate our solution using two business process data sets, including one from a real-world event log, and show that we are able to detect errors and predict failures with high accuracy.

Advanced Business Process Management in Networked E-Business Scenarios

In the modern economy, we see a shift towards networked business scenarios. In many contemporary situations, the operation of multiple organizations is tightly coupled in collaborative business networks. To allow this tightly coupled collaboration, business process management (BPM) in these collaborative networks is becoming increasingly important. We discuss automated support for this networked BPM: automated means to manage business processes that span multiple autonomous organizations - thereby combining aspects of process management and e-business. We first provide a conceptual background for networked BPM. We describe a number of research approaches in this area, ranging from early developments to contemporary designs in a service-oriented context. This provides an overview of developments in which we observe several major trends. Firstly, we see a development from support for static business processes to support for highly dynamic processes. Secondly, we see how approaches move from addressing simple business collaboration networks to addressing complex networks. Thirdly, we find a move from the use of dedicated information technology to the use of standard technology. Finally, we observe that the BPM research efforts move through time from pushing new BPM technology into application domains to using BPM to realize business-IT alignment in application contexts.