Limitations of Performance Measurement Systems based on Key Performance Indicators

Measuring performance is a key to optimize business processes. However, many of them cannot be easily measured due totheir non-deterministic or qualitative nature. So, to fit in common performance measurement systems (PMS) that normallyuse numeric parameters (KPIs), artificial and simplifying measures have to be used that are complicated and costly to createand evaluate. Using a literature review, this paper documents the dominance of PMS that rely on KPIs and a lack of thosethat also incorporate non-numeric, generic indicators that better address qualitative problems. Combined with the discussionof different viewpoints to PMS properties as well as the demand for better transparency and comparability of businessprocesses, the necessity of deployment for a refined PMS using additional indirect indicators is derived. It would be able toassess hidden performance problems and hence to reveal additional business process improvement possibilities

Consolidating Findings from Business Process Change Case Studies Using System Dynamics: The Example of Employee Morale

In this paper, we explore system dynamics as a useful approach to consolidate findings from case studies on business process change (BPC) projects. We compile data from 65 BPC case studies to develop a system dynamics simulation model that helps us to investigate ‘employee morale’ as an important construct in BPC projects. We show that such simulation models consolidate the complex and often non-linear findings from BPC case studies in a way that makes it available to discourse among researchers, lecturers and students as well as BPC professionals. Thus, this paper contributes to knowledge management and learning by suggesting system dynamics as a valuable approach to illustrate and convey the complex relationships between important constructs in BPC. This paper also contributes to the domain of business process management by demonstrating the benefits of system dynamics as a way to review and consolidate the abundance of BPC case studies