A meta-model and procedure guiding business process improvement

Abstract

Companies often try to improve their business processes in order to get better results from them, considering features like costs, time, as well as quality. The current business process improvement scenario includes several methodologies and techniques that help companies to make things better. Nevertheless, the state of the art in this topic lacks of a methodology which can be applied by companies, withouth considering the industry they work in. In addition, it lacks of a structured guideline which considers as the starting point the generic improvement goals the companies would like to reach. This thesis proposes a business process improvement framework. It helps companies to determine which actions they should take and which performance indicators they have to be considered in order to improve a specific feature of a business process. The framework proposed is composed by different elements and several interrelations among them. As the first step, it takes into account a set of improvement goals which can be applied to any kind of business processes, no matter what is the business field the company operates in. By proposing a set of different improvement goals, companies are free to choose the ones they would like to focus on. In other words, they are able to choose the features they would like to improve, for a specific business process....