Business process model plasticity: inclusion and evaluation of the PAR heuristic

Abstract

In today’s rapidly evolving environment, improving business performance is a critical provision for any organization. Heuristic Process Redesign, constitutes one of the most entrenched transactional analytical methods stemming from core ideas behind Lean Six Sigma and BP Reengineering. However, BPR in practice is still less science than art. Practitioners usually recede on best practices when performing Business Process Redesign. Despite the fact that over the past two decades various papers addressed Business Process Redesign and BPR best practices little is known regarding the general instructions when it comes down to applying them. Business process redesign can be implemented with the use of several best practices guidelines, but they still have some limitations in their application domain and/or they are not adopted in a large scale. This thesis focuses on the Parallelism heuristic, taking into account several handpicked complexity metrics related to it. In order to determine when to apply Parallelism and under which terms it emphatically affects a business process, experiments were conducted on various business processes taken from the existing literature. The aforementioned experiments included:(a) the calculation of the chosen complexity metrics relevant to the Parallelism best practice and then using the Bender method and logistic regression to extract thresholds for these metrics regarding the Plasticity notion of BP models in terms of their eligibility and capability to be redesigned ,and b) questionnaire that was handed out to undergraduate and postgraduate students containing various business process models from the literature (presented with the use of BPMN), postulating questions that if certain tasks could be put in parallel within the process ,instead of remaining sequential, would the process benefit from the changes or not (i.e. identifying the correlation between the metrics and Plasticity , supporting the hypothesis).