A Roadmap to Critical Redesign Choices That Increase the Robustness of Business Process Redesign Initiatives

Abstract

The elaborate analysis of a business process (BP) typically informs its potential for business process redesign (BPR), but the latter is usually conducted in a non-systematic way. The purpose of this paper is the introduction of the Business Process Redesign Capacity Assessment (BP-RCA) framework that assesses the redesign capability of BP models, prior to their implementation. This study combines key redesign features introduced by domain experts, to a conceptual framework that takes into consideration an inclusive set of BPR components in three consecutive phases, towards facilitating organizations in the practice of redesign decision making. In this paper, an illustrative case study is used to present the initial phase (selection) of the framework. To assess the usability of the BP-RCA, the authors reviewed twelve established redesign initiatives from literature which proved to implicitly follow similar steps to the proposed framework. The findings indicate that the BP-RCA framework provides a systematic exploration of fundamental redesign aspects and can be used as a reliable measurement of the redesign capacity of candidate BP models. The framework also provides practitioners with the necessary methodology for increasing the BPR effectiveness, the robustness of the varying initiatives and the overall innovativeness of businesses.