A Critical Evaluation and Framework of Business Process Improvement Methods

The redesign of business processes has a huge potential in terms of reducing costs and throughput times, as well as improving customer satisfaction. Despite rapid developments in the business process management discipline during the last decade, a comprehensive overview of the options to methodologically support a team to move from as-is process insights to to-be process alternatives is lacking. As such, no safeguard exists that a systematic exploration of the full range of redesign possibilities takes place by practitioners. Consequently, many attractive redesign possibilities remain unidentified and the improvement potential of redesign initiatives is not fulfilled. This systematic literature review establishes a comprehensive methodological framework, which serves as a catalog for process improvement use cases. The framework contains an overview of all the method options regarding the generation of process improvement ideas. This is established by identifying six key methodological decision areas, e.g. the human actors who can be invited to generate these ideas or the information that can be collected prior to this act. This framework enables practitioners to compose a well-considered method to generate process improvement ideas themselves. Based on a critical evaluation of the framework, the authors also offer recommendations that support academic researchers in grounding and improving methods for generating process Accepted after two revisions by the editors of the special issue. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s12599-015-0417-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. ir. R. J. B. Vanwersch (&) Dr. ir. I. Vanderfeesten Prof. Dr. ir. P. Grefen School of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, De Lismortel, room K.3, P.O. Box 513, 5600 MB Eindhoven, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected] Dr. K. Shahzad College of Information Technology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan Dr. K. Vanhaecht Department of Public Health and Primary Care, KU Leuven, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Dr. K. Vanhaecht Department of Quality Management, University Hospitals KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Prof. Dr. ir. L. Pintelon Centre for Industrial Management/Traffic and Infrastructure, KU Leuven, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium Prof. Dr. J. Mendling Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria Prof. Dr. G. G. van Merode Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands Prof. Dr. ir. H. A. Reijers Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands Prof. Dr. ir. H. A. Reijers Department of Computer Science, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands 123 Bus Inf Syst Eng 58(1):43–53 (2016) DOI 10.1007/s12599-015-0417-x