Demonstrating the effectiveness of process improvement patterns

Abstract

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. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.