بهترین شیوه در طراحی مجدد فرآیند کسب و کار : یک مرور کلی و ارزیابی کیفی از ابتکارات طراحی مجدد موفق

To implement business process redesign several best practices can be distinguished. This paper gives an overview of heuristic rules that can support practitioners to develop a business process design that is a radical improvement of a current design. The emphasis is on the mechanics of the process, rather than on behavioral or change management aspects. The various best practices are derived from a wide literature survey and supplemented with experiences of the authors. To evaluate the impact of each best practice along the dimensions of cost, flexibility, time and quality, a conceptual framework is presented that synthesizes views from areas such as information systems development, enterprise modeling and workflow management. The best practices are thought to have a wide applicability across various industries and business processes. They can be used as a “check list” for process redesign under the umbrella of diverse management approaches such as Total Cycle Time compression, the Lean Enterprise and Constraints Management.

A business process redesign (BPR) initiative is commonly seen as a twofold challenge (e.g. [1], [2] and [3]): • a technical challenge, which is due to the difficulty of developing a process design that is a radical improvement of the current design, • a socio-cultural challenge, resulting from the severe organizational effects on the involved people, which may lead them to react against those changes. Apart from these challenges, project management of a BPR initiative itself is also often named as a separate BPR challenge (e.g. [4]). Many methodologies, techniques, and tools have been proposed that face one or more of the mentioned challenges in a more or less integrated approach (for an overview see [5]). Prescriptive literature in the field is sometimes advertised as “a step-by-step guide to business transformation” (e.g. [1]) suggesting a complete treatment of the organizational and technical issues involved with BPR. However, work like this seems to be primarily aimed at impressing a business audience. At best it gives some directions to manage organizational risk, but commonly lacks actual technical direction to (re)design a business process. Even the classic work of Hammer and Champy [6] devotes only 14 out of a total of over 250 pages to this issue, of which 11 pages are used for the description of a case. Gerrits [7] mentions: “In the literature on BPR, examples of successful BPR implementations are given. Unfortunately, the literature restricts itself to descriptions of the 'situation before’ and the 'situation after’, giving very little information on the redesign process itself”. According to Motwani et al. [8], in the meanwhile, research in BPR progressed slightly to also include the development of conceptual models for assessing and executing BPR. However, the main criticism to these models/steps is that there has been little effort to use the existing theory to develop a comprehensive integrated model on BPR. Valiris and Glykas [9] also recognize as limitations of existing BPR methodologies that “there is a lack of a systematic approach that can lead a process redesigner through a series of steps for the achievement of process redesign”. As Sharp and McDermott [10] commented more recently: “How to get from the as-is to the to-be [in a BPR project] isn't explained, so we conclude that during the break, the famous ATAMO procedure is invoked—And Then, A Miracle occurs”. In our research we are interested in developing a methodology for BPR implementation based not only in detailing steps for BPR but also on guiding and supporting the BPR execution by means of techniques and best practices. In this context our first concern is to adopt (or define) an existing framework for BPR. We will not try to present yet another integrated BPR methodology, the framework should only allow the user of the BPR methodology to recognize the important topics and their relationships. The second concern is to identify among the literature and the successful execution of current BPR implementations the best practices that may/should be used for each topic of the framework. Brand and Van der Kolk's [11] evaluation framework will be used to assess the (supposed) effects of a best practice on cost, quality, time and flexibility. Our final concern is to guide the users to when and in which order to apply these best practices. This latter point also includes guidance towards the limits of these best practices and their validity domain. This involves an extensive study of all the best practices identified. In this paper, we will only focus on the first and second concern of our research, namely: • defining a framework for BPR implementation and • identifying the best practices in BPR implementation. The best practices which are identified should be seen as independent rules of thumb, each of which can be of value to support practitioners in facing the technical challenge of a BPR project. Merely applying these rules, however, is unlikely to lead to sustained success. In the first place, the BPR practices we will discuss focus on the mechanics of the process and do not cover how the behavior of people working within the process can be influenced. Anybody who conducted a BPR project realizes that the latter is a crucial factor in making a process transformation successful. Secondly, the application of these various best practices must be embedded within an overall vision on BPR that is adopted for the project. Several well-known management philosophies exist that can guide the overall course of a reengineering project, such as Total Cycle Time Compression [12] and [13], the Lean Enterprise approach [14] and Constraints Management [15] and [16]. Although a discussion of these various approaches is outside the scope of this paper, it is important to point out here that the best practices we discuss should be seen as being on a lower, more operational level than these encompassing approaches. Many of the best practices we mention do have a wide application across these approaches. For example, consider the case of the reengineering of a manufacturing company as in [17]. This BPR project was driven by a Total Cycle Time Compression approach in which several best practices we list in this paper were applied, such as empowerment and the introduction of process-wide technology. Another example is the task elimination best practice, which originated from the same experiences within the Toyota company that shaped “lean thinking” as an overall management philosophy [18]. In summary, we believe that adopting an overall management vision on BPR is a necessary condition for making the application of BPR best practices effective and to give direction to a BPR effort. And in return, the implementation of such a BPR vision can be helped by considering the best practices we present in the rest of this paper. The structure of the paper is now as follows. First we will present a framework for BPR implementation in Section 2. It will serve as a guidance to which topics should be considered when implementing BPR. Before we discuss the various best practices, we will describe a model in Section 3 that serves as a frame of reference for their assessment. Next we will describe the BPR best practices in Section 4. For each best practice, we will present its general formulation, its potential effects and possible drawbacks. We will also indicate similarities in best practices, provide references to their origin and—if available—to known quantitative or analytic support. A summary of all contributions to the best practices will be analyzed in Table 1. The paper ends with our conclusions and future research.

In this paper we have dealt with the best practices in implementing BPR. A framework for classifying the best practices was given. It is the result of the experience of other authors mixed with our own experience. It helps structuring the implementation of a BPR initiative. In this framework we have described 29 best practices and evaluated qualitatively their impact on the cost, quality, flexibility and time criteria as defined by Brand and van der Kolk [11]. In Table 1 we summarize within our framework for BPR the best practices’ impact and authors’ contribution to their application. Examples from real cases are also given if available. The table shows that the best practices have been applied to several types of industries, ranging from the accounts’ department at Ford industries to Fast foods, health sector organizations (Baxter health care), some manufacturing processes (Toyota, a furniture factory, a semi-conductors manufacturer), IBM credit insurance processes and various other administrative processes. Despite this wide range of applications, and our personal experience in applying these rules in service contexts (i.e. invoice processing and purchasing), we believe there is still a need to further investigate the impact and relevance of each best practice to specific industrial segments. One recent approach in this area is by MacIntosh [50], who compares private and public sector BPR applications. These applications cover some of the best practices we discussed in this paper (integral business process technology, task automation, contact reduction, etc.). MacIntosh [50] does not question the appropriateness of the solutions in the separate industrial segments, but stresses differences with respect to behavioral issues. On another level, Table 1 clearly shows that—except for the contributions of Buzacott [36], Seidmann and Sundarajan [25], Dewan et al. [43] and Van der Aalst [45] to some best practices—most of the best practices lack the support of an analytical or empirical study. Additional work should point out the conditions or domain validity where a best practice would give the expected results in terms of cost/time reduction or quality/flexibility improvement. This introduces the future research directions for this paper, which are: • At first, to further validate our BPR framework and set of best practices through an extensive survey amongst consultants and through real case studies. The survey aims at further identifying the most used best practices and the framework's elements that are crucial for BPR. Case studies would give further insight into how the framework can be used during a BPR implementation. • Then to investigate for all best practices when, where and how to apply or not apply them. This part is concerned with giving indications to the size of the business process or the tasks involved. Also, it should study the relative impact of best practices on a business process. In this area, Foster [51] assessed the impact of BPR (essentially organizational automation impacts) in a hospital using base lining. Also, Seidmann and Sundarajan [52] studied the popular combination of the empower and the triage best practices (leading to decentralization and task consolidation). They proved, using mathematical models, that this combination is sub-optimal in many cases. • At last, to provide users with a methodology in applying best practices. This includes the classification of the best practices within the framework for BPR implementation as a basis (which was one of the purposes of this paper) and as a guideline to the order/conditions in which the best practices should be implemented. Of course, several authors have already investigated this area. Harrington [53] provided a streamlining of business process redesign rules. Kettinger and Teng [54] provide a framework for analyzing BPR in conjunction with several strategic dimensions. However, these approaches lack the set of measures and guidelines to the application of the best practices. We believe that in presenting in this paper the best practices together with their qualitative assessments we provide support to the practitioner of BPR dealing with the mechanics of the process. The best practices may be used as a checklist with (limited) additional guidance for the application of each of these, so that a favorable redesign of a business process becomes feasible. The checklist should be incorporated within a BPR methodology that addresses managerial aspects as well. One suggestion would be to use the five themes listed by Maull et al. [55] that lead to effective BPR implementation: integrating the business strategy, integrating performance measurement, creating business process architectures, involving human and organizational factors and identifying the role of information and technology.