M Mariska Netjes

On the Formal Generation of Process Redesigns

Business Process Redesign (BPR) is a process oriented methodology to improve organizations. Although literature on BPR is available in abundance, little concrete support on how to get from as is towards to be is available ?. We propose the use of an evolutionary redesign approach that is based on BPR best practices to fill this gap. The approach is evolutionary in nature, because local updates are made to an existing process. In this paper we focus on one part of the approach: the generation of redesign alternatives. The first step in the generation of an alternative process is the selection of a process part for redesign. This is followed by a process transformation that determines an alternative for this selected part. Finally, the original process part is replaced by the transformed part resulting in the alternative process. Using Petri net analysis techniques the correctness of such a redesign generation is ensured.

Quantifying the Performance of Workflows

Abstract Business process redesign is one of the most powerful ways to boost business performance and to improve customer satisfaction (Limam Mansar & Reijers, 2005). A possible approach to business process redesign is using redesign best practices. A previous study identified a set of 29 different redesign best practices (Reijers, 2003). However, little is known about the exact impact of these redesign best practices on workflow performance. This study proposes an approach that can be used to quantify the impact of a business process redesign project on all dimensions of workflow performance. The approach consists of a large set of performance measures and a simulation toolkit. It supports the quantification of the impact of the implementation of redesign best practices, in order to determine what best practice or combination of best practices leads to the most favorable effect in a specific business process. The approach is developed based on a quantification project for the parallel best practice and is validated with two other quantification projects, namely for the knockout and triage best practices.

Trade-offs in the performance of workflows: quantifying the impact of best practices

Business process redesign is one of the most powerful ways to boost business performance and to improve customer satisfaction [14]. A possible approach to business process redesign is using redesign best practices. A previous study identified a set of 29 different redesign best practices [18]. However, little is known about the exact impact of these redesign best practices on workflow performance. This study proposes an approach that can be used to quantify the impact of a business process redesign project on all dimensions of workflow performance. The approach consists of a large set of performance measures and a simulation toolkit. It supports the quantification of the impact of the implementation of redesign best practices, in order to determine what best practice or combination of best practices leads to the most favorable effect in a specific business process. The approach is developed based on a quantification project for the parallel best practice [8] and is validated with two other quantification projects, namely for the knockout and triage best practices.

Performing Business Process Redesign with Best Practices: An Evolutionary Approach

Although extensive literature on BPR is available, there is still a lack of concrete guidance on actually changing processes for the better. In this paper we propose and detail out an evolutionary approach towards business process redesign. We describe the steps to derive a better performing redesign using the existing process model as input. The redesign steps are: 1) computing process measures, 2) evaluating condition statements to find applicable redesign “best practices”, 3) creating alternative models according to these best practices, and 4) evaluating the performance of the created alternatives. The end result is a new process model. We show the applicability of the steps with a case study. Our approach has a formal basis to make it suitable for automation.

“Intelligent” tools for workflow process redesign: a research agenda

Although much attention is being paid to business processes during the past decades, the design of business processes and particularly workflow processes is still more art than science. In this workshop paper, we present our view on modeling methods for workflow processes and introduce our research aiming for the development of an “intelligent” software tool for workflow process redesign. This tool uses two approaches to redesign workflows: an evolutionary approach, focussing on local updates to a given process, and a revolutionary approach, starting with a clean-sheet of paper.

A redesign framework for call centers

An important shortcoming in the Business Process Redesign (BPR) literature is the lack of concrete guidance on how to improve an existing business process. Our earlier work has aimed at filling this gap by identifying a set of BPR best practices. This paper takes a further step by showing how a set of best practices can be used to derive a redesign framework for a specific domain, in this case for call centers. Such a framework identifies the various available design options and specifies the relevant performance characteristics. To evaluate concrete design configurations (i.e., coherent combinations of design choices) we use a formal modelling approach based on Petri nets and the simulation tool CPN-Tools. An industrial case study is used to gather relevant context data. We expect that this work helps researchers and practitioners to optimize the performance of actual call centers and to set up similar frameworks for other domains.