Business processes: four perspectives

As organizations strive to do things faster, cheaper, and better, it is increasingly important to redesign and improve business processes so as to meet customer needs efficiently and effectively. Although there is widespread literature on business process transformation, there is little discussion of the nature of business processes. This is surely important if transformation is to be successful. This chapter provides a conceptual framework to support a thorough exploration of the nature of business processes. The framework uses four viewpoints to group different notions of business processes, each highlighting certain aspects while placing less emphasis on others. The viewpoints provide the basis for a discussion of the strengths and limitations of different modeling approaches used in the transformation of business processes. We conclude that business processes are multifaceted, and, therefore, successful transformation may require the combination of both soft and hard modeling approaches

A Redesign Framework for Call Centers

An important shortcoming in the Business Process Redesign (BPR) literature is the lack of concrete guidance on how to improve an existing business process. Our earlier work has aimed at filling this gap by identifying a set of BPR best practices. This paper takes a further step by showing how a set of best practices can be used to derive a redesign framework for a specific domain, in this case for call centers. Such a framework identifies the various available design options and specifies the relevant performance characteristics. To evaluate concrete design configurations (i.e., coherent combinations of design choices) we use a formal modelling approach based on Petri nets and the simulation tool CPN-Tools. An industrial case study is used to gather relevant context data. We expect that this work helps researchers and practitioners to optimize the performance of actual call centers and to set up similar frameworks for other domains