An approach for measuring flexibility of business processes based on distances between models and their variants

Abstract

The strong and fast competitions in which organizations are involved lead them to frequently change and adapt their business processes. In fact, business process flexibility has been one of the richest topics in business process management for the last two decades, as it gathers all efforts to allow for changes in certain parts of the process, while keeping others stable. Nevertheless, such changes may lead, in turn, to a large number of process variants derived from the same process model, but differing in structure. In this paper, we propose a quantitative approach to measure the flexibility of business processes regarding their different perspectives: functional, operational, behavioral, informational and organizational. We define therefore the perspective-based distances, which is based on computing change operations. The resulting measures can help organizations to better understand how much flexibility do their business processes enclose, taking into account the model variants they’ve been using. To exemplify our approach, we used a real-world emergency care process as a case study.