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A Critical Evaluation and Framework of Business Process Improvement Methods

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Abstract

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 improvement ideas. Next to the framework and its critical evaluation, this review investigates the research procedures of the studies that were used to create the framework. Related to this investigation, academic researchers can find additional guidance regarding procedures for building and evaluating new methods.

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Notes

  1. A preliminary version of this protocol has already been published: Vanwersch et al. (2011).

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 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

    Rob J. B. Vanwersch,  Irene Vanderfeesten &  Paul Grefen

  2. College of Information Technology, University of the Punjab, Lahore, Pakistan

    Khurram Shahzad

  3. Department of Public Health and Primary Care, KU Leuven, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Kris Vanhaecht

  4. Department of Quality Management, University Hospitals KU Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Kris Vanhaecht

  5. Centre for Industrial Management/Traffic and Infrastructure, KU Leuven, University of Leuven, Leuven, Belgium

    Liliane Pintelon

  6. Institute for Information Business, Vienna University of Economics and Business, Vienna, Austria

    Jan Mendling

  7. Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, The Netherlands

    Godefridus G. van Merode

  8. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    Hajo A. Reijers

  9. Department of Computer Science, VU University Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Hajo A. Reijers

Authors
  1. Rob J. B. Vanwersch
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  2. Khurram Shahzad
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  3. Irene Vanderfeesten
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  4. Kris Vanhaecht
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  5. Paul Grefen
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  6. Liliane Pintelon
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  7. Jan Mendling
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  8. Godefridus G. van Merode
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  9. Hajo A. Reijers
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rob J. B. Vanwersch.

Additional information

Accepted after two revisions by the editors of the special issue.

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See separate file 25-6_Vanwersch_Appendix.pdf (PDF 652 kb)

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Vanwersch, R.J.B., Shahzad, K., Vanderfeesten, I. et al. A Critical Evaluation and Framework of Business Process Improvement Methods. Bus Inf Syst Eng 58, 43–53 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-015-0417-x

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-015-0417-x

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