Structured literature review on business process performance analysis and evaluation
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paper_title: Fundamentals of Business Process Management

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Business Process Management (BPM) is the art and science of how work should be performed in an organization in order to ensure consistent outputs and to take advantage of improvement opportunities, e.g. reducing costs, execution times or error rates. Importantly, BPM is not about improving the way individual activities are performed, but rather about managing entire chains of events, activities and decisions that ultimately produce added value for an organization and its customers. This textbook encompasses the entire BPM lifecycle, from process identification to process monitoring, covering along the way process modelling, analysis, redesign and automation. Concepts, methods and tools from business management, computer science and industrial engineering are blended into one comprehensive and inter-disciplinary approach. The presentation is illustrated using the BPMN industry standard defined by the Object Management Group and widely endorsed by practitioners and vendors worldwide. In addition to explaining the relevant conceptual background, the book provides dozens of examples, more than 100 hands-on exercises many with solutions as well as numerous suggestions for further reading. The textbook is the result of many years of combined teaching experience of the authors, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels as well as in the context of professional training. Students and professionals from both business management and computer science will benefit from the step-by-step style of the textbook and its focus on fundamental concepts and proven methods. Lecturers will appreciate the class-tested format and the additional teaching material available on the accompanying website fundamentals-of-bpm.org.
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paper_title: Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution.

paper_content:

The article reviews the book “Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution,” by Michael Hammer and James Champy.
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paper_title: Performance modeling and analysis of workflow

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Workflow model analysis is performed at logic, temporal, and performance levels. This paper mainly deals with the performance level issues. Workflow net (WF-net) is extended with time information to the timing workflow net (TWF-net). To provide a formal framework for modeling and analyzing workflow, this paper proposes a multidimension workflow net (MWF-net) that include multiple TWF-nets and the organization and resource information. The algorithm to decompose a free-choice and acyclic Petri nets (PN) into a set of T-components is extended to a TWF-net containing iteration structures. Then, resource availability and workload analysis is performed. A method for computing the lower bound of average turnaround time of transaction instances processed in a MWF-net is proposed. Finally a case study is used to show that the proposed method can be effectively utilized in practice.
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paper_title: The effects of process orientation: a literature review

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to carry out a literature review of studies that have analyzed the effects of process orientation (PO).Design/methodology/approach – An examination of the literature is undertaken to review studies that report about the influence of PO on organizational performance. Studies are classified into statements without straight empirical support, quantitative studies, and case studies.Findings – A total of 26 studies are identified that report about effects of PO on organizational performance. Studies where positive effects are obtained are predominant. The effects most often reported are speed improvements, increase of customer satisfaction, improvement of quality, reduction of cost, and improvement of financial performance.Research limitations/implications – According to the results of the paper, positive effects of PO are clearly more often reported than negative effects. It might be the case that popular press and case studies tend to report positive effects more often ...
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paper_title: On being ‘systematic’ in literature reviews

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General guidelines for conducting literature reviews often do not address the question of literature searches and dealing with a potentially large number of identified sources. These issues are specifically addressed by so-called systematic literature reviews (SLR) that propose a strict protocol for the search and appraisal of literature. Moreover, SLR are claimed to be a ‘standardized method’ for literature reviews, that is, replicable, transparent, objective, unbiased, and rigorous, and thus superior to other approaches for conducting literature reviews. These are significant and consequential claims that — 2014; despite increasing adoption of SLR — 2014; remained largely unnoticed in the information systems (IS) literature. The objective of this debate is to draw attention of the IS community to SLR’s claims, to question their justification and reveal potential risks of their adoption. This is achieved by first examining the origins of SLR and the prescribed systematic literature review process and then by critically assessing their claims and implications. In this debate, we show that SLR are applicable and useful for a very specific kind of literature review, a meta study that identifies and summarizes evidence from earlier research. We also demonstrate that the claims that SLR provide superior quality are not justified. More importantly, we argue that SLR as a general approach to conducting literature reviews is highly questionable, concealing significant perils. The paper cautions that SLR could undermine critical engagement with literature and what it means to be scholarly in academic work.
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paper_title: Modelling the regulative role of business processes with use and misuse cases

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a framework for understanding value‐added and abuse prevention activities in business processes.Design/methodology/approach – The paper considers business processes as a regulation mechanism that an organization uses to survive and flourish in its environment. It proposes a theoretical framework based on the concept of homeostasis, the maintenance of identity in a changing world. In this framework the paper classifies business processes into three levels (strategic, operational, regulative) and analyse the relationships between these three levels. Based on this framework, the paper extends the “Use and Misuse Cases” technique to support modelling of value‐added and abuse prevention activities.Findings – The main finding is the importance of considering business processes as regulation mechanisms. Traditionally, business processes are analysed through the goals they are designed to achieve. This paper analyses what the organization aims at maintaining. This...
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paper_title: The influence of directive explanations on users’ business process compliance performance

paper_content:

Purpose – In organizations, individual user’s compliance with business processes is important from a regulatory and efficiency point of view. The restriction of users’ choices by implementing a restrictive information system is a typical approach in many organizations. However, restrictions and mandated compliance may affect employees’ performance negatively. Especially when users need a certain degree of flexibility in completing their work activity. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of directive explanations (DEs). DEs provide context-dependent feedback to users, but do not force users to comply. Design/methodology/approach – The experimental study used in this paper aims at investigating how DEs influence users’ process compliance. The authors used a laboratory experiment to test the proposed hypotheses. Every participant underwent four trials for which business process compliance was measured. Two trial blocks were used to cluster the four trials. Diagrammatic DEs were provided in ...
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paper_title: A framework to review performance measurement systems

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Purpose – This paper aims to describe a structured review framework for managing business performance. The framework entails the review of business performance, including the strategic relevance of the measures, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of the performance measurement system itself.Design/methodology/approach – A range of approaches and tools are employed in the framework, which features a review card providing a high‐level view of the review process, showing the different types of review perspectives and their interactions.Findings – The performance measurement system of an organisation is a mechanism to manage and control the organisation. Maintaining the effectiveness of the organisation and the measurement systems requires a systematic review process. The process of reviewing performance is a complex task that spans the whole organisation. A good review process seeks the correct balance between organisational benefits and the effort required.Originality/value – Overall, the framework...
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paper_title: Inter-organizational business process verification in public administration

paper_content:

Purpose – Public services can be modelled, analysed and implemented using notations and tools for the business process (BP) abstraction. Applying such an explicit approach public administrations (PAs) can better react to the undergoing transformation in service provisioning and they can continuously improve service quality in order to satisfy citizens and business requests, while coping with decreasing budgets. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed approach relies on using formal methods, in particular unfolding to analyse the correctness of BP. The paper also compares and selects mapping rules from semi-formal to formal modelling languages; these techniques are presented in the context of the BP Modelling Languages and Petri Net (PN). Findings – Main aim of this paper is to raise the need for formal verification of BP governing the interactions among PAs, which more and more need to be supported by ICT mechanisms, and then are not so much toleran...
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paper_title: Analyzing process uncertainty through virtual process simulation

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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose virtual process simulation as a technique for identifying and analyzing uncertainty in processes. Uncertainty is composed of both risks and opportunities.Design/methodology/approach – Virtual process simulation involves the creation of graphical models representing the process of interest and associated tasks. Graphical models representing the resources (e.g. people, facilities, tools, etc.) are also created. The members of the resources graphical models are assigned to process tasks in all possible combinations. Secondary calculi, representing uncertainty, are imposed upon these models to determine scores. From the scores, changes in process structure or resource allocation can be used to manage uncertainty.Findings – The example illustrates the benefits of utilizing virtual process simulation in process pre‐planning. Process pre‐planning can be used as part of strategic or operational uncertainty management.Practical implications – This paper presents an...
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paper_title: Detecting Potential Weaknesses in Business Processes - An Exploration of Semantic Pattern Matching in Process Models

paper_content:

Purpose – Automating the task of identifying process weaknesses using process models is promising, as many organizations have to manage a large amount of process models. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a pattern-based approach for automatically detecting potential process weaknesses in semantic process models, thus supporting the task of business process improvement. Design/methodology/approach – Based on design research, combined with a case study, the authors explore the design, application and evaluation of a pattern-based process weakness detection approach within the setting of a real-life case study in a German bank. Findings – Business process weakness detection can be automated to a remarkable extent using pattern matching and a semantic business process modeling language. A case study provided evidence that such an approach highly supports business process analysts. Research limitations/implications – The presented approach is limited by the fact that not every potential process weaknes...
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paper_title: Business Process Control-Flow Complexity: Metric, Evaluation, and Validation

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Organizations are increasingly faced with the challenge of managing business processes, workflows, and recently, Web processes. One important aspect of business processes that has been overlooked is their complexity. High complexity in processes may result in poor understandability, errors, defects, and exceptions, leading processes to need more time to develop, test, and maintain. Therefore, excessive complexity should be avoided. Business process measurement is the task of empirically and objectively assigning numbers to the properties of business processes in such a way so as to describe them. Desirable attributes to study and measure include complexity, cost, maintainability, and reliability. In our work, we will focus on investigating process complexity. We present and describe a metric to analyze the control-flow complexity of business processes. The metric is evaluated in terms of Weyukerâ€™s properties in order to guarantee that it qualifies as good and comprehensive. To test the validity of the metric, we describe the experiment we have carried out for empirically validating the metric.
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paper_title: How to attain and sustain excellence with performance-based process management

paper_content:

An organization's effectiveness in implementing a strategy always depends on its capability to realize selected strategic goals through the performance levels achieved by its processes. Critical business processes are the basic means to support a company's strategic objectives according to set priorities. Through them management optimizes the deployment of all, but especially human resources in the work stations that form the value adding process stages. This paper describes a systematic approach for selecting the critical processes with the greatest impact on important strategic goals. This is done by evaluating process value adding contributions to attain business excellence. An evaluation of total performance for any organization must rely on all the criteria that address its critical success factors. In such a context process analysis becomes the linchpin of strategic management and work performers (individuals or teams). Thus, accurate process performance assessment plays a most decisive role in deve...
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paper_title: An MDA‐based framework for collaborative business process modelling

paper_content:

Purpose – This paper aims to present a new approach for developing a framework based on a model driven architecture (MDA) for the modelling of technology‐independent collaborative processes.Design/methodology/approach – The paper suggests a new collaborative process modelling approach based on an MDA and a metamodelling technique. The research method, based on the design science approach, was started by identifying the characteristics of the collaborative processes, which distinguish them from the classical intraorganizational ones. Then, the generic collaborative business process (CBP) modelling framework is developed based on MDA approach and definition of a set of transformation rules through three layers: business, process, and technical. After that, the core component of the framework was the proposition of a generic CBP metamodel at PIM/MDA level. The specific collaboration participant's business processes (expressed as BPMN model) are generated from the generic CBP model represented as an UML2 Prof...
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paper_title: The effects of process orientation: a literature review

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to carry out a literature review of studies that have analyzed the effects of process orientation (PO).Design/methodology/approach – An examination of the literature is undertaken to review studies that report about the influence of PO on organizational performance. Studies are classified into statements without straight empirical support, quantitative studies, and case studies.Findings – A total of 26 studies are identified that report about effects of PO on organizational performance. Studies where positive effects are obtained are predominant. The effects most often reported are speed improvements, increase of customer satisfaction, improvement of quality, reduction of cost, and improvement of financial performance.Research limitations/implications – According to the results of the paper, positive effects of PO are clearly more often reported than negative effects. It might be the case that popular press and case studies tend to report positive effects more often ...
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paper_title: Performance assessment architecture for collaborative business processes in BPM-SOA-based environment

paper_content:

To be competitive and flexible, companies engage in collaborations to develop and share their competences in order to cope with the dynamic environment. Collaborative business process evaluation helps to reflect the actual functioning of business process and their performance level. In this perspective, research in assessing collaborative business process performance presents relevant guidelines in order to adapt IT solutions when business requirements evolve.In this paper, we present an analysis and assessment approach for collaborative business processes in the service-oriented architecture in order to maintain their performance in competitive markets. Our approach proposes an evaluation method using execution traces of business process combined with a high-level assessment method using key performance indicators. Our main objectives are to track the execution of collaborative business process and to analyze the performance trajectory of a business process regarding the business performance level. To collect and structure the performance knowledge (execution and measurement), we create an ontological model-based knowledge repository in order to enrich the semantics of an evaluation business process. The precise track of execution data in our approach is able to identify events that disrupt the proper functioning of processes at the runtime. From an industrial case study, we can conclude that our ontological approach can target the performance assessment of collaborative business processes effectively.
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paper_title: From process measurement to performance improvement

paper_content:

This paper uses basic principles from complexity theory, psychology and management theory to demonstrate that many traditional methods of identifying performance measures may not result in improvements in overall performance. In order to illustrate this, the paper first identifies the answers to six fundamental questions that are critical to the success of Process measurement, if it is to move away from just measuring performance to a fully integrated approach to improving process performance. The paper then addresses a final question on the type of measurement approach that is most likely to improve organizational performance. The answers to these seven questions make a compelling argument for a reassessment of many different established approaches to measurement. However, rather than proposing yet another, different approach, it outlines the steps that integrate other approaches into a single, unified measurement approach to improving process performance.
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paper_title: Information flows and business process integration

paper_content:

Purpose – Many business process improvement efforts emphasize better integration, yet process integration can mean many things. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of information flows to modern business processes, and draw upon recent organizational and information systems literature to characterize process integration and to derive four principles of process integration: accessibility, timeliness, transparency, and granularity of information flows.Design/methodology/approach – Using a field study, the four principles of process integration are applied to analyze ten different business processes across five organizations.Findings – In total, 18 generalized activities are identified that describe non‐integrated behavior, and “keying in known data” was found to be the most common. Among other findings, analysis highlights the importance of documentation to modern business processes, especially for coordination roles, and the paper describes three different purposes for documentation fo...
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paper_title: Business process interoperability and collaborative performance measurement

paper_content:

In the recent years, inter-organisational cooperation has been one of the organisational strategies most used to compete and become adapted to the exigencies of the global market. In this context, internal business processes of the cooperative enterprises should interact to pursue common objectives that will be profitable for all parts. Therefore, it is necessary to measure the performance of these business processes under a strategic approach and in a twofold manner, from a global perspective (inter-enterprise) and from an individual or partial perspective (intra-enterprise). Performance measurement systems (PMSs) described in the literature that discuss this context are very different in their conception and broadness. This paper describes the basic characteristics that PMSs should fulfil to cover interoperability requirements and a literature review of the PMSs that deal with business process interoperability in order to gain detailed insight into PMS definition for these contexts. From the literature review, a comparison of the PMSs is obtained with regard to eight core characteristics for these contexts: business process representation, business process measurement, business process lifecycle management, PMS intra and interorganisational levels measurement, process-decomposition approach, intra-inter-process connection measurement, interorganisational coordination measurement, and common interorganisational strategy.
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paper_title: Towards a formal definition of goal-oriented business process patterns

paper_content:

Purpose - Organizations of today are becoming ever more focused on their business processes. This has resulted in an increasing interest in using best practices for business process re-engineering. ...
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paper_title: Information flows and business process integration

paper_content:

Purpose – Many business process improvement efforts emphasize better integration, yet process integration can mean many things. The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the importance of information flows to modern business processes, and draw upon recent organizational and information systems literature to characterize process integration and to derive four principles of process integration: accessibility, timeliness, transparency, and granularity of information flows.Design/methodology/approach – Using a field study, the four principles of process integration are applied to analyze ten different business processes across five organizations.Findings – In total, 18 generalized activities are identified that describe non‐integrated behavior, and “keying in known data” was found to be the most common. Among other findings, analysis highlights the importance of documentation to modern business processes, especially for coordination roles, and the paper describes three different purposes for documentation fo...
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paper_title: The quest for organizational flexibility: Driving changes in business processes through the identification of relevant context

paper_content:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a method for identifying business process-relevant contextual information that is likely to impact on the process goal. The ORGANON method describes a semi-structured procedural guide alongside with a set of criteria and a matrix for analyzing ontological transactions, which can be used to identify which context information can be considered relevant to a business process. Design/methodology/approach – The authors report on an evaluation of the ORGANON method through a case study conducted in an organization that works in the social security domain. Findings – The results provide evidences of the feasibility of the method application in this scenario. Originality/value – Our research contributes to the literature on business processes flexibility, specifically through a proposal for context identification that can be extended to current techniques for business process modeling and in turn forms the basis for existing approaches for making business processe...
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paper_title: Detecting Potential Weaknesses in Business Processes - An Exploration of Semantic Pattern Matching in Process Models

paper_content:

Purpose – Automating the task of identifying process weaknesses using process models is promising, as many organizations have to manage a large amount of process models. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a pattern-based approach for automatically detecting potential process weaknesses in semantic process models, thus supporting the task of business process improvement. Design/methodology/approach – Based on design research, combined with a case study, the authors explore the design, application and evaluation of a pattern-based process weakness detection approach within the setting of a real-life case study in a German bank. Findings – Business process weakness detection can be automated to a remarkable extent using pattern matching and a semantic business process modeling language. A case study provided evidence that such an approach highly supports business process analysts. Research limitations/implications – The presented approach is limited by the fact that not every potential process weaknes...
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paper_title: Process improvement through economically driven routing of instances

paper_content:

Purpose – Process improvement is a fundamental activity of the business process management (BPM) lifecycle. However, practitioners still lack concrete guidance and adequate objectives for process improvement. Moreover, improvement projects typically tie up considerable amounts of capital and are very risky. Thus, more guidance is needed on how to derive concrete recommendations for process improvement in a goal-oriented manner. The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The authors propose a decision model that determines along which paths the instances of a process should be routed to maximize the value contribution of the process. To do so, the decision model requires a process model and a set of historical process instances as inputs. Findings – The decision model builds on the idea that only the parameters of the process, i.e., the values according to which it is decided on which path an instance traverses the process, can be modified, without altering the structure of the p...
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paper_title: Inter-organizational business process verification in public administration

paper_content:

Purpose – Public services can be modelled, analysed and implemented using notations and tools for the business process (BP) abstraction. Applying such an explicit approach public administrations (PAs) can better react to the undergoing transformation in service provisioning and they can continuously improve service quality in order to satisfy citizens and business requests, while coping with decreasing budgets. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed approach relies on using formal methods, in particular unfolding to analyse the correctness of BP. The paper also compares and selects mapping rules from semi-formal to formal modelling languages; these techniques are presented in the context of the BP Modelling Languages and Petri Net (PN). Findings – Main aim of this paper is to raise the need for formal verification of BP governing the interactions among PAs, which more and more need to be supported by ICT mechanisms, and then are not so much toleran...
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paper_title: A weakness determination and analysis model for business process improvement

paper_content:

Purpose – Modeling of the methods for providing improvements in business processes by value adding is researched with an integrated approach. The main purpose in this approach is improving the processes by determining and analyzing the weak points and reducing the weakness degrees.Design/methodology/approach – The designed model determines weak points that need to be improved, analyzes them to find privileged processes in improvement by considering improvement costs and obtains the improvement degrees for defining the improvement strategy by four‐phase business process improvement framework: start‐up, self analysis, defining improvement strategy for making changes, feedback, and continuous improvement.Findings – The key factor in keeping up with changes in market conditions is systematic application of improvement efforts and providing planned and controlled value addition with these improvements. Decision problems in process improvement can be structured to provide input data suitable for multi‐criteria ...
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paper_title: Performance assessment architecture for collaborative business processes in BPM-SOA-based environment

paper_content:

To be competitive and flexible, companies engage in collaborations to develop and share their competences in order to cope with the dynamic environment. Collaborative business process evaluation helps to reflect the actual functioning of business process and their performance level. In this perspective, research in assessing collaborative business process performance presents relevant guidelines in order to adapt IT solutions when business requirements evolve.In this paper, we present an analysis and assessment approach for collaborative business processes in the service-oriented architecture in order to maintain their performance in competitive markets. Our approach proposes an evaluation method using execution traces of business process combined with a high-level assessment method using key performance indicators. Our main objectives are to track the execution of collaborative business process and to analyze the performance trajectory of a business process regarding the business performance level. To collect and structure the performance knowledge (execution and measurement), we create an ontological model-based knowledge repository in order to enrich the semantics of an evaluation business process. The precise track of execution data in our approach is able to identify events that disrupt the proper functioning of processes at the runtime. From an industrial case study, we can conclude that our ontological approach can target the performance assessment of collaborative business processes effectively.
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paper_title: How to attain and sustain excellence with performance-based process management

paper_content:

An organization's effectiveness in implementing a strategy always depends on its capability to realize selected strategic goals through the performance levels achieved by its processes. Critical business processes are the basic means to support a company's strategic objectives according to set priorities. Through them management optimizes the deployment of all, but especially human resources in the work stations that form the value adding process stages. This paper describes a systematic approach for selecting the critical processes with the greatest impact on important strategic goals. This is done by evaluating process value adding contributions to attain business excellence. An evaluation of total performance for any organization must rely on all the criteria that address its critical success factors. In such a context process analysis becomes the linchpin of strategic management and work performers (individuals or teams). Thus, accurate process performance assessment plays a most decisive role in deve...
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paper_title: Business process portfolio selection in re-engineering projects

paper_content:

Purpose – In today's societies, work environment and customers' expectations change on a daily manner. Consequently, it is crucial for companies to find a way for adapting themselves to new requirements. For this purpose, reengineering projects have been introduced and evolved in different companies with different responsibilities over the past decades. However, the risk associated with these projects is inevitable and is a huge obstacle on the way of their implementation. This study, in line with previous studies, contributed in this context by proposing a new methodology for selecting suitable processes and adopted best practices candidate for business process reengineering (BPR). The proposed methodology aims to achieve lower risk and higher probability of success for BPR projects. Design/methodology/approach – This objective is achieved by integration of the concept of portfolio selection problems (PSP) into the organizational decision making concerning BPR project. A model for selection of most appro...
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Title: Structured Literature Review on Business Process Performance Analysis and Evaluation
Section 1: Introduction
Description 1: Write about the significance of business process capability and its impact on organizations, emphasizing business process reengineering, management, and improvement approaches.

Section 2: Analysis of business process improvement and effects
Description 2: Discuss various approaches to improving business processes, the impact of business process analysis on identifying process problems, and evaluating the effects of process redesign.

Section 3: Method
Description 3: Detail the methodology used for the meta-analysis and structured literature review, including selection criteria, keywords, databases used, and the overall approach to the literature search.

Section 4: Results and discussion
Description 4: Present the findings from the content analysis of selected papers, summarizing contributions relevant to the research questions, categorization of processes, and process improvement methods.

Section 5: Improvement of process performance impact on business performance
Description 5: Explore methods and tools designed to enhance the impact of process improvements on organizational performance, focusing on process selection principles.

Section 6: Business process performance measurement
Description 6: Review various concepts and frameworks for measuring business process performance, their impact on managing processes, and alignment with business goals.

Section 7: Business process as a part of value chain
Description 7: Analyze business processes within the context of a value chain, focusing on process integration, inter-organizational interaction, and outsourcing decisions.

Section 8: Framework integrating the domains of business process analysis
Description 8: Summarize the integration of different levels and domains of business process analysis, highlighting key research streams and conceptual approaches to process structure and functioning.

Section 9: Exploratory potential areas for future inquiry
Description 9: Identify less investigated but relevant issues in business process performance, such as external information management and knowledge-based processes, proposing directions for future research.

Section 10: Conclusions
Description 10: Provide a structured summary of the main findings from the literature review, emphasizing conceptualization, research levels, and potential areas for future inquiry in business process performance analysis.