Business Process Quality Management

During the past 25 years, research in the field of business process management as well as the practical adoption of corresponding methods and tools have made substantial progress. In particular, this development was driven by the insight that well-managed business processes enable organizations to better serve their stakeholders, save costs and, ultimately, realize competitive advantage. It is therefore not surprising that improving business processes ranks high on the list of priorities of organizations. In practice, this challenge is currently being addressed through approaches such as benchmarking, industry-specific best practice reference models or process reengineering heuristics. However, no systematic and generic proposition towards managing business process quality has achieved broad acceptance yet. To address this gap, this thesis contributes to the field of business process quality management with the results lined out in the following. First, it defines a concise notion of business process quality based on organizational targets, and applies it to a sample real-world case. This definition is not specific to any particular application field, and thus constitutes a vital first step towards systematic and generic business process quality management. On that basis, an approach is developed to model business objectives in the sense of the requirements that shall be fulfilled by the results of a business process. In turn, this approach enables appraising if a business process achieves its business objective as one of the core criteria relevant to business process quality. Further, this thesis proposes extensions to common business process meta-models which enable quality-aware business process modeling, and demonstrates how fundamental quality characteristics can be derived from corresponding models. At this stage, the results achieved have enabled an advanced understanding of business process quality. By means of these insights, a model of business process quality attributes with corresponding quality criteria is developed. This model complements and exceeds preceding approaches since, for the first time, it systematically derives relevant quality attributes from a business process management perspective instead of adopting these from related fields. It enables appraising business process quality independently of a particular field of application, and deriving recommendations to improve the processes assessed. To enable practical adoption of the concepts developed, the integration of procedures and functionality relevant to quality in business process management lifecycles and system landscapes is discussed next. To establish the contribution of this thesis beyond the previous state of the art, the proposed quality model is then compared to existing business process reengineering practices as well as propositions in the area of business process quality. Further, quality attributes are employed to improve a substantial real-world business process. This experience report demonstrates how quality management practices can be applied even if quality-aware system landscapes are not in place yet. It thus contributes to bridging the gap between the research results proposed in this thesis and the conditions present in practice today. Finally, remaining limitations with regard to the research objectives pursued are discussed, and challenges for future research are lined out. Addressing the latter will enable further leveraging the potentials of business process quality management

Basic Considerations on Business Process Quality

Quality management practices in manufacturing and logistics have led to proven results for organisations with respect to competitiveness and protability. At the same time, business process management not only addresses a comprehensive functional scope including the ever more important administrative functions and business services, but also contributes to realising potentials (e.g. in the field of process automation) through extensive use of information technology. Integrating quality management with business process management concepts is thus very promising from a business perspective. The evolution of a clear understanding of business process quality constitutes a fundamental prerequisite for progress in this field as only a concise definition will point out the issues that need to be addressed in more detailed research. This report aims at discussing basic considerations in this respect. We look into requirements to be posed towards a definition of business process quality, discuss various basic quality views and their fit with business process management, provide a fundamental if not yet practically applicable business process quality definition, and examine related aspects of business processes as well as related work. While this approach will not lead to a finally applicable definition of business process quality, its contribution will lie in entering into a more systematic discussion to encompass the wide array of existing results that can be correlated with business process quality and giving directions for future research

Demonstrating the Effectiveness of Process Improvement Patterns

Improving the operational efficiency of processes is an important goal of business process management (BPM). There exist many proposals with regard to process improvement patterns (PIPs) as practices that aim at supporting this task. Nevertheless, there is still a gap with respect to validating PIPs in terms of their actual business value for a specific organization. Based on empirical research and experience from consulting projects, this paper proposes a method to tackle this challenge. Our approach towards a-priori validation of process improvement patterns considers real-world constraints such as the role of senior stakeholders and opportunities such as process mining techniques. In the sense of an experience report, our approach as well as results are illustrated on the basis of a real-world business process from human resources management, covering a transactional volume of about 29,000 process instances over the period of one year. Overall, our proposal enables practitioners and researchers to subject PIPs to a sound validation procedure before taking any process implementation decision

Effective application of process improvement patterns to business processes

Improving the operational effectiveness and efficiency of processes is a fundamental task of business process management (BPM). There exist many proposals of process improvement patterns (PIPs) as practices that aim at supporting this goal. Selecting and implementing relevant PIPs are therefore an important prerequisite for establishing process-aware information systems in enterprises. Nevertheless, there is still a gap regarding the validation of PIPs with respect to their actual business value for a specific application scenario before implementation investments are incurred. Based on empirical research as well as experiences from BPM projects, this paper proposes a method to tackle this challenge. Our approach toward the assessment of process improvement patterns considers real-world constraints such as the role of senior stakeholders or the cost of adapting available IT systems. In addition, it outlines process improvement potentials that arise from the information technology infrastructure available to organizations, particularly regarding the combination of enterprise resource planning with business process intelligence. Our approach is illustrated along a real-world business process from human resource management. The latter covers a transactional volume of about 29,000 process instances over a period of 1 year. Overall, our approach enables both practitioners and researchers to reasonably assess PIPs before taking any process implementation decision

Formalizing Concepts for Efficacy-aware Business Process Modeling

In business process design, business objective models can fulfill the role of formal requirement denitions. Matching process models against objective models would, for instance, enable sound comparison of implementation alternatives. For that purpose, objective models should be available independently of their concrete implementation in a business process. This issue is not addressed by common business process management concepts yet. Moreover, process models are currently not sufficiently expressive to determine business process efficacy in the sense of fulfilling a business objective. Therefore, this paper develops and integrates constructs required for efficacy-aware process modeling and apt to extend common modeling approaches. The concept is illustrated with a sample scenario. Overall, it serves as an enabler for progressive applications like automated process optimization

Modeling Business Objectives for Business Process Management

For application scenarios such as the management of business process variants or business process quality, business objective models assume the role of formal requirements definitions as in software engineering. However, effective concepts in this area still constitute a gap in the presently available array of business process management methods. To address this issue, this paper develops and shortly evaluates a refined business objective modeling approach. Our approach builds on use case-based effectiveness criteria, and on insights gained from assessing the state of the art. It derives required constructs and interrelations from application scenarios, and integrates these into a business objective meta-model. As an initial validation of our concept, we model a sample scenario and match the results against effectiveness criteria

Process Quality and Performance in a Shared Services Environment

Shared services organizations work closely with their clients to design, implement and enact service processes. This shared responsibility poses particular governance challenges that cannot be fully addressed through conventional service level management or end-to-end performance indicators such as cycle times. Rather, effective managerial analysis and control of processes in a shared services environment requires appropriate concepts to comprehensively assess process quality in the sense of design and implementation, and process performance in the sense of execution. To ensure effective control, the underlying concepts of process quality and performance should enable to delineate the responsibilities of shared services organizations and clients, and reflect the overall targets of the organization to ensure effective control. This chapter develops a corresponding approach by analyzing the impact of shared services processes on organizational targets, deriving concise dimensions of process quality and process performance in a shared services environment. On that basis, it provides frameworks to support process quality and process performance assessment which can be refined to a concrete application scenario

Demonstrating the effectiveness of process improvement patterns with mining results

Improving the operational efficiency of processes is an important goal of business process management (BPM). There exist many proposals with regard to process improvement patterns (PIPs) as practices that aim at supporting this task. Nevertheless, there is still a gap with respect to validating PIPs in terms of their actual business value for a specific organization. Based on empirical research and experience from consulting projects, this paper proposes a method to tackle this challenge. Our approach towards a-priori validation of process improvement patterns considers real-world constraints such as the role of senior stakeholders and opportunities such as process mining techniques. In the sense of an experience report, our approach as well as results are illustrated on the basis of a real-world business process from human resources management, covering a transactional volume of about 29,000 process instances over the period of one year. Overall, our proposal enables practitioners and researchers to subject PIPs to a sound validation procedure before taking any process implementation decision

Basic considerations on business process quality

Quality management practices in manufacturing and logistics have led to proven results for organisations with respect to competitiveness and portability. At the same time, business process management not only addresses a comprehensive functional scope including the ever more important administrative functions and business services, but also contributes to realising potentials (e.g. in the field of process automation) through extensive use of information technology. Integrating quality management with business process management concepts is thus very promising from a business perspective. The evolution of a clear understanding of business process quality constitutes a fundamental prerequisite for progress in this field as only a concise definition will point out the issues that need to be addressed in more detailed research. This report aims at discussing basic considerations in this respect. We look into requirements to be posed towards a definition of business process quality, discuss various basic quality views and their fit with business process management, provide a fundamental if not yet practically applicable business process quality definition, and examine related aspects of business processes as well as related work. While this approach will not lead to a finally applicable definition of business process quality, its contribution will lie in entering into a more systematic discussion to encompass the wide array of existing results that can be correlated with business process quality and giving directions for future research