Business process performance measurement: a structured literature review of indicators, measures and metrics

Abstract

Measuring the performance of business processes has become a central issue in both academia and business, since organizations are challenged to achieve effective and efficient results. Applying performance measurement models to this purpose ensures alignment with a business strategy, which implies that the choice of performance indicators is organization-dependent. Nonetheless, such measurement models generally suffer from a lack of guidance regarding the performance indicators that exist and how they can be concretized in practice. To fill this gap, we conducted a structured literature review to find patterns or trends in the research on business process performance measurement. The study also documents an extended list of 140 process-related performance indicators in a systematic manner by further categorizing them into 11 performance perspectives in order to gain a holistic view. Managers and scholars can consult the provided list to choose the indicators that are of interest to them, considering each perspective. The structured literature review concludes with avenues for further research.

Sustainability and Continuous Improvement of Organization: Review of Process-Oriented Performance Indicators

“…Studies mention at least five different elements that help to describe and analyse the organization's performance. They are: objectives [23,[46][47][48][49][50][51], metrics [23,47,48,52,53], data measures [23][24][25][26][46][47][48][49], indicators [23,[46][47][48]54,55] and key performance indicators (KPI) [23,39,[45][46][47]49,52,[55][56][57][58][59]. Each of these elements is important to monitor the organization's activities.…”

“…They are linked to the business strategy and they have to be relevant and achievable in a specific time period. [49,50] The key aspect is to develop balanced process improvement objectives that are described by the set of KPIs. [23,51] Performance targets and objectives in the organization are introduced with the top to bottom approach.…”

Sustainability Performance Measurement

“…By reviewing extant literature, [20] identified two groups of papers on this topic. The first group focused on performance measurement models; the second on performance indicators.…”

Towards Smart Assessment: A Metamodel Proposal

“…An assessment is the act of estimating or deciding the amount, value, quality, or importance of a specific entity. In the organisational context, enterprises and the scientific community have pursued to evaluate different aspects such as process performance [1], business processes maturity [2], enterprise interoperability [3], software agility [4], Industry 4.0 readiness [5], enterprise risk management [6], cooperative enterprise information systems interoperability [7], among others. Assessments may serve organisations for descriptive, prescriptive or comparative purposes.…”