Enhancing Process Improvement

Business process improvement and innovation is considered the most value-adding stage in the business process management lifecycle, to increase efficiency, free up scarce resources and ensure alignment between strategy and operations to create and sustain value. Given the dynamic nature of organizational environments, business processes must be continuously adapted to various changes. Effective business process improvement and innovation requires proficiency across multiple dimensions: mastery of methods and tools, in-depth process knowledge and the ability to execute related initiatives. As business processes become more complex and the need for rapid adaptation increases, research into supportive methods and tools for business process improvement and innovation is essential. This thesis aims to advance process improvement and innovation, with the former focusing on incremental refinements and the latter on radical innovations in the context of current technological and societal trends. Therefore, this cumulative dissertation comprises eight research papers addressing three overarching objectives. First, fundamental research on systems that provide computational support for the overall business process improvement and innovation stage is required to structure existing literature and conceptual knowledge. Existing knowledge is scattered, and it is unclear how such systems function or should be designed in the future. To address the identified research needs, this paper presents two contributions that address these gaps: Research Paper P1 analyzes the literature on systems for business process improvement and innovation and structures their functionality with conceptual knowledge in a taxonomy. Existing artifacts are analyzed to reflect the status quo of current research. Research Paper P2 drafts principles for the design of novel process improvement and innovation systems. Secondly, the activities in business process improvement include the analysis of current processes as well as the development, evaluation and selection of process design options. Four research articles in this dissertation aim to contribute new methods and tools to support these activities. Research Paper P3 develops an interactive approach that supports the analysis of traces of historical process execution data (event logs) by matching analysts’ requirements with the principles of visual analytics. Research Paper P4 presents an interactive system for process improvement as a reference architecture. The approach assists users by utilizing existing process data, progressively incorporating higher levels of automation. Research Paper P5 presents a method for converting process improvement best practices into programmed rule sets that enable their repeated application to multiple event logs. In addition, Research Paper P6 provides an approach to improve vehicle routing in meal delivery, a customer-oriented process, by introducing minor process changes during execution. Third, this dissertation emphasizes the critical role of people and culture in business process management. Process improvement knowledge is often communicated through best practices. Research Paper P7 provides a catalog of process improvement patterns tailored to the allocation of human resources. To comprehensively integrate the human element into process improvement, Research Paper P8 introduces process improvement methodology with a particular focus on employee involvement. The dissertation concludes by reflecting on limitations that suggest avenues for future research. The included research papers significantly contribute to advancing business process improvement and innovation. The thesis establishes a foundation for understanding and designing systems that automate business process improvement and innovation through computational support. Second, four artifacts are presented that focus on data-driven business process improvement. Finally, the thesis presents two artifacts that emphasize the integration of people and culture in business process improvement and highlight the crucial role of human and cultural factors in process improvement.