بررسی ارزیابی فرآیند و مدل انتخابی برای مدیریت فرآیند کسب و کار

Currently, BPM is considered as the suitable framework for today’s process-centric trends and BPM may result in considerable rewards for companies adopting it. For successful BPM initiative, the selection of suitable processes for BPM is very important. However, it is difficult to evaluate systematically and reasonably business processes for enterprises that plan to introduce BPM. This paper describes a web-based business process evaluation model based on BSC and fuzzy AHP for BPM. A web-based business process evaluation system was implemented and it provides impartial and reasonable results to enterprises or concerned persons that have insufficient experience and knowledge about BPM. Thus, this paper demonstrates the applicability of fuzzy AHP and BSC concepts in business process evaluation and selection for BPM, and provides a systemic guidance in the decision-making process.

Many surveys indicated that the gap between IT and business is growing and that might signal a change in how enterprise technology is run. There are also increasing reports of IT not meeting business needs. Therefore, there is a need for better communication and understanding between IT and Business. To overcome this gap, many companies emphasis on the importance of business processes and the role of IT. BPM (business process management) has emerged as a new breed of process-centric approaches for companies that consider processes to be fundamental business assets (Davenport, 1992, Hammer and Champy, 1993 and Lee and Dale, 1998). However, to be fully effective, BPM must not be approached as simply another IT toolset but rather as an environment where a business-process-oriented view is the means of communicating business requirements throughout the organization. BPM solutions hold the promise of bringing a process-centric approach to IT solutions (Sinur, 2003 and Smith and Finger, 2003). BPM uses a technology designed specifically to manage business processes. These BPM systems are an enabler of business innovation because of the dramatic potential for improving the performance and agility of companies (Verner, 2004). In BPM initiative, the selection of suitable processes for BPM is one of the most important issues. However, because of the wide variety of business processes existing, the selection of business process for BPM is extremely difficult and time-consuming task. The other important factors contributing to the complexity of process selection are evaluation criteria imposed by the business characteristics of the individual organization and the existence of some level of uncertainty due to vagueness or fuzziness of the evaluation criteria. Owing to the unstructured nature of the problem, there are not many research works related to process selection problem (Weck, Klocke, Schell, & Ruenauver, 1997). Most are incomplete prototypes that consider only a limited number of evaluation criteria, and are not very successful to deal with the qualitative factors associated with the problem. In addition, very little attention has been paid for selecting business process for BPM from a set of alternatives under fuzzy environment. Furthermore, there are no reports of the deployment of such process evaluation tools for BPM or platforms on the web to make it widely accessible to potential users. This paper presents a web-based model called Biz_Tower for business process evaluation and selection for BPM initiative. The model employs BSC (balanced scorecard) and Fuzzy AHP (analytic hierarchy process), and decision algorithms to identify an appropriate solution. An example is given to demonstrate the application of Biz_Tower.

In this research, a model based on BSC and fuzzy AHP for evaluation and selection of business processes for BPM is proposed and a web-based system called Biz_Tower is constructed to execute the model. The decision hierarchy is structured by the four major perspectives of BSC including financial, customer, internal business, and learning and growth, followed by criteria and detailed criteria. AHP is also used to generate the weighting of the four perspectives and the weighting of the evaluation criteria. Because human decision-making process usually contains vagueness, fuzzy theory is adopted to solve this problem. Some distinguished contributions of this research are as follows: 1. This research adopts the concept of BSC to construct a decision hierarchy for evaluation and selection of business processes for BPM. Based on interview with experts in this field and experience, a total of 29 detailed evaluation elements are finalized. 2. AHP and fuzzy set theory are adopted to develop a systematic evaluation model. 3. The α-cut and λ operations are also implemented to consider a diversity of user environment and to compare the solutions obtained. 4. The comprehensive design nature of the system combined with the deployment on the web to make it accessible worldwide is what distinguishes Biz_Tower from all prior computer-aided BPM process selection systems that have been developed and reported in open literature. It provides impartial and reasonable results to enterprises or concerned persons that have insufficient experience and knowledge about BPM.