Business Process Management Study of European companies

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TABLE OF CONTENT

Chapter 1: Introduction1

Background of the Study1

Purpose of the Study2

Significance of the Study3

Research Aims and Objectives3

Research Question3

Chapter 2: Literature Review4

Business Process4

Business Process Management5

Business Process Management in European Companies7

Chapter 3: Methodology12

Instrument for data collection12

Data analysis13

Time Line13

Ethical Considerations14

Limitations15

Recommendations16

References18

Chapter 1: Introduction

Today, organizations often need to modify their business processes to cope with changes in the environment, such as mergers/acquisitions, new government regulations, and new customer demand. Most organizations also have a set of business policies defining the way they conduct their business. Although there has been extensive research on process analysis and design, how to systematically extract workflow models from business policies has not been studied, resulting in a missing link between the specification of business policies and the modelling of business processes (Adam, 2008, p. 158). Given that process changes are often determined by executives and managers at the policy level, the aforementioned missing link often leads to inefficient and inaccurate implementation of process changes by business analysts and process designers. We refer to this problem as the policy mismatch problem in business process management. For organizations with large-scale business processes and a large number of business policies, solving the policy mismatch problem is very difficult and challenging.

Background of the Study

Since early 90s, Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has attracted much attention in both industry and academia in Europe. As a critical stage of BPR, identifying and analyzing existing organizational processes is the foundation for any further process changes and improvements (Wang, 2005, p. 56). The goal of process design projects is to help organizations identify, understand, and improve their AS-IS processes by applying process mapping methodologies and related tools. Most process design projects are mainly conducted in a participative manner, where process information is obtained via extensive interviews, meetings, and workshops. Although participative process mapping projects can collect the most detailed process information, they tend to be time-consuming and resource-intensive. Moreover, due to their subjective nature and incorporation of different user opinions, the collected data usually contains ambiguous, uncertain, and conflicting information, which makes process model extractions from those data very difficult (Sheng, 2004b, p. 34). Businesses in Europe are moving toward the use of BPMS to automate their complex and cross-organizational business processes that interact with different information systems and human beings inside and outside the boundaries of organizations. The arising complexity needs to be monitored not only to control the current situation but also to improve and align the business processes and goals. Although both classical process control and quality methodologies (e.g. six sigma, Lean Thinking, TQM) and new technologies promise to provide such monitoring, each of them has some inadequacies that prevent organizations from having an integrated methodology and tool set for process monitoring and improvement.

Purpose of the Study

The main purpose of this study will be to make an analysis on the business process management in European companies. The aspect of business process management is getting success day by day. Just like the other countries, European countries are also focusing on ...