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The Business Value of Process Flexibility

An Optimization Model and Its Application in the Service Sector

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Abstract

Promising to cope with increasing demand variety and uncertainty, flexibility in general and process flexibility in particular are becoming ever more desired corporate capabilities. During the last years, the business process management and the production/operations management communities have proposed numerous approaches that investigate how to valuate and determine an appropriate level of process flexibility. Most of these approaches are very restrictive regarding their application domain, neglect characteristics of the involved processes and outputs other than demand and capacity, and do not conduct a thorough economic analysis of process flexibility. Against this backdrop, the authors propose an optimization model that determines an appropriate level of process flexibility in line with the principles of value-based business process management. The model includes demand uncertainty, variability, criticality, and similarity as process characteristics. The paper also reports on the insights gained from applying the optimization model to the coverage switching processes of an insurance broker pool company.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FIM Research Center Finance & Information Management, University of Augsburg, Universitätsstraße 12, 86159, Augsburg, Germany

    Patrick Afflerbach, Gregor Kastner,  Felix Krause &  Maximilian Röglinger

Authors
  1. Patrick Afflerbach
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  2. Gregor Kastner
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  3. Felix Krause
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  4. Maximilian Röglinger
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Maximilian Röglinger.

Additional information

Accepted after one revision by the editors of the special focus.

This article is also available in German in print and via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: Afflerbach P., Kastner G., Krause F., Röglinger M. (2014) Der Wertbeitrag von Prozessflexibilität. Ein Optimierungsmodell und seine Anwendung im Dienstleistungssektor. WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. doi: 10.1007/s11576-014-0423-5.

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Afflerbach, P., Kastner, G., Krause, F. et al. The Business Value of Process Flexibility. Bus Inf Syst Eng 6, 203–214 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-014-0333-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-014-0333-5

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