Prioritization of Interconnected Processes

Abstract

Deciding which business processes to improve is a challenge for all organizations. The literature on business process management (BPM) offers several approaches that support process prioritization. As many approaches share the individual process as unit of analysis, they determine the processes' need for improvement mostly based on performance indicators, but neglect how processes are interconnected. So far, the interconnections of processes are only captured for descriptive purposes in process model repositories or business process architectures (BPAs). Prioritizing processes without catering for their interconnectedness, however, biases prioritization decisions and causes a misallocation of corporate funds. What is missing are process prioritization approaches that consider the processes' individual need for improvement and their interconnectedness. To address this research problem, the authors propose the ProcessPageRank (PPR) as their main contribution. The PPR prioritizes processes of a given BPA by ranking them according to their network-adjusted need for improvement. The PPR builds on knowledge from process performance management, BPAs, and network analysis -particularly the Google PageRank. As for evaluation, the authors validated the PPR's design specification against empirically validated and theory-backed design propositions. They also instantiated the PPR's design specification as a software prototype and applied the prototype to a real-world BPA.

Exogenous Shocks and Business Process Management

“…BPM research should build on such works to establish guidance regarding the identification and assessment of critical processes in line with corporate strategy, which should be resilient to sustain essential organizational functions in the event of exogenous shocks. In this regard, examining established approaches related to process prioritization can be very valuable in determining processes' criticality both individually and based on their interconnectedness (Lehnert et al 2018;Kreuzer et al 2020).…”

On the composition of the long tail of business processes: Implications from a process mining study

“…company-level vs. process-level) and the applied measures for process performance (e.g. performance-based vs. non-performance-based) [29].…”

“…By consolidating individual views, companies can obtain an in-depth understanding of the drivers and obstacles to business success. However, non-performance-based methods are typically time-consuming, complex, and prone to assessment bias [29].…”

“…By consolidating individual views, companies can obtain an in-depth understanding of the drivers and obstacles to business success. However, non-performance-based methods are typically time-consuming, complex, and prone to assessment bias [29]. While non-performance-based methods provide important qualitative evidence for process performance measurement, they are costly and unsuitable for frequently recurring analyses due to their complexity and difficulty to derive unambiguous results.…”

“…While run-time flexibility captures a process's capabilities for handling changes during process execution, build-time flexibility relates to adaptations to its design. As political and cultural perceptions are hardly persisted in an event log, we consider a process's complexity in terms of its build-time flexibility as a suitable proxy for its adaptability.Lehnert, et al[29] emphasize the relevance of structural and stochastic dependencies in process networks. They assess the centrality of processes within a company's organizational structure and determine their complexity and, thus, feasibility based on the number of links to other processes.…”