Business Workflow Optimization Through Process Model Redesign

Business process redesign has garnered much interest because such processes must be continuously improved to realize greater efficiency in the midst of evolving changes in work practices, environment, and technology. This helps a business to stay competitive. A process model may be redesigned by a rearrangement of various activities as per best practices to satisfy predefined business rules and constraints for a specific objective. This objective is stated in terms of functional goals like desired or acceptable process behavior, and nonfunctional goals such as cost, time, quality of service, and flexibility. Thus, many potential improvement possibilities that emerge through restructuring can be explored. When many such alternatives exist, there is a need for a formal methodology for evaluating these designs on various metrics to gain a deeper understanding of the tradeoffs involved. In this article, we describe a novel, formal methodology for optimizing the cost-benefit considerations within a space of possible redesigns to develop a cost vs. time efficient frontier. We also illustrate our approach with two case studies, one based on a large, real dataset, and describe a proposal for implementing it. Several managerial insights emerge from our work.