Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and ...

Cost
Case assignment
Flexible assignment
Centralization
Split responsibilities
Quality
H.A. Reijers, S. Liman Mansar / Omega 33 (2005) 283 – 306 301
Flexibility
Time
Fig. 18. Evaluation of organization structure best practices (I).
Cost
Customer teams
Numerical
involvement
Case manager
Quality
Flexibility
Time
Fig. 19. Evaluation of organization structure best practices (II).
1
2
Fig. 20. Extra resources.
Note that this best practice di ers from the triage concept
in the sense that the focus is not on the division of
tasks.
3
Fig. 21. Specialist-generalist.
Fig. 22. Empower.
Poyssick and Hannaford [4] and Berg and Pottjewijd [38]
stress the advantages of generalists. Rupp and Russell [39],
Seidmann and Sundararajan [25] mention both specialists
and generalists.
4.4.2.2. Empower: ‘give workers most of the decisionmaking
authority and reduce middle management’. In
traditional business processes, substantial time may be spent
on authorizing work that has been done by others. When
workers are empowered to take decisions independently,
it may result in smoother operations with lower throughput
times. The reduction of middle management from the
business process also reduces the labor cost spent on the
processing of orders. A drawback may be that the quality of
the decisions is lower and that obvious errors are no longer
found. If bad decisions or errors result in rework, the cost
of handling a order may actually increase compared to the
original situation (Fig. 22).
This best practice is named by Hammer and Champy [6],
Rupp and Russell [39], Seidmann and Sundarajan [25] and
Poyssick and Hannaford [4]. Buzacott [36] shows with a
simple quantitative model that this best practice may indeed
increase performance.
4.4.2.3. Evaluation. The assessment of the best practices
for the organization population is given in Fig. 23.
Note that only one of the two interpretations of the specialist–generalist
best practice is shown in Fig. 23.
4.5. Information
4.5.1. Control addition: ‘check the completeness and
correctness of incoming materials and check the output
before it is send to customers’
This best practice promotes the addition of controls to
a business process. It may lead to a higher quality of the
business process execution and, as a result, to less required
rework (Fig. 24). Obviously, an additional control will require
time and will absorb resources. Note the contrast of
the intent of this best practice with that of the task elimi-