Performance measures to evaluate the impact of best practices

Abstract

Business process redesign best practices help to generate alternative process redesigns. Best practices are often used by practitioners to repeat design techniques that have proven effective in practice, but it is not clear why they are the best, and in what respect. More importantly, it is unclear why a best practice might be “best” for one process and not for another. In this paper, we propose a framework for performance measures that can be used to evaluate the effect of a redesign with the dimensions of time, cost, quality and flexibility. For each dimension we propose a set of measures, which have been operationalized as much as possible. We conclude that a simulation approach is very well applicable to estimate the impact of redesign best practices, especially for the time, cost and flexibility measures. For quality measures additional methods are necessary to complement the estimation.