The digital economy is highly volatile and uncertain. Ever-changing customer needs and technical progress increase the pressure on organizations to continuously improve and innovate their business processes. The ability to anticipate incremental and radical process changes required in the future is a critical success factor. However, organizations often fail to forecast future business process designs and process performance. One reason is that Business Process Management (BPM) is dominated by reactive methods (e.g., lean management, traditional process monitoring), whereas there are only a few future-oriented approaches (e.g., process simulation, predictive process monitoring). This paper supports the shift towards proactive BPM by coining the notion of process forecasting-an umbrella concept for future-oriented BPM methods and techniques. We motivate the need for process forecasting by eliciting various types of process forecasting from BPM use cases and create a first understanding of its scope by providing a definition, a reference process, showing the steps to be followed in process forecasting initiatives, and a positioning against related BPM sub-areas. The definition and reference process are based on a structured literature review.
PurposeCustomer centricity has evolved into a success factor for many companies, requiring all corporate activities – including business processes – to be aligned with customer needs. With most existing approaches to business process (re-)design focusing on process efficiency, customers are often treated as second-class citizens. Despite emergent research on customer process management, there is a lack of guidance on how to design customer-centric business processes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors conducted a structured literature review and analyzed companies awarded for outstanding customer centricity to compile design heuristics for customer-centric business processes. The authors iteratively validated and refined these heuristics with experts from academia and industry. Finally, the heuristics was grouped according to their expected impact on interaction capabilities to enable their prioritization in specific settings.FindingsThe authors proposed 15 expert-approved and literature-backed design heuristics for customer-centric business processes together with real-world examples. The heuristics aim at increasing customer satisfaction with interaction-intensive core processes, which is an important driver of corporate success.Originality/valueThe design heuristics complement existing efficiency-centered (re-)design heuristics. They reflect cognitive shortcuts that support process analysts in the generation of innovative ideas during process (re-)design. The heuristics also add to customer process management and help put customer centricity into practice.
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