Automated Process (Re-)Design

Abstract

Business process management (BPM) continuously attracts academia and practice, as it is known to drive organizational performance. Especially process (re-)design entails significant economic value by introducing innovation, reducing costs, as well as improving quality, productivity, and customer experience. Thus, it is considered an essential phase in the BPM lifecycle. Today, organizations must overthink their business processes at an increasingly fast pace, consider continuously rising customer needs, create novel process-based value propositions, and engage in innovation to stay successful. Technological developments are rapidly gaining momentum, processes are at drift, and ever more players enter the global market, resulting in the organizational environment becoming more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA). Even though this poses pressure on organizations, it also offers a wide range of opportunities. While automation is prevalent in other BPM lifecycle phases (e.g., in process execution), process (re-)design commonly requires manual activities such as traditional creativity techniques, making it time-consuming and labor-intensive. Thus, automated process (re-)design holds high yet unexploited potential for long-term corporate success since it could accelerate process (re-) design and make it more efficient as well as less dependent on human creativity