Author(s): Ilahi, Latifa ; Ghannouchi, Sonia Ayachi ; Martinho, Ricardo
Date: 2022
Origin: International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management
Subject(s): BPM; Process variants; Template model; Generalisation; Healthcare processes; Similarity metrics; BPM; BPM; Process variants; Process variants; Template model; Template model; Generalisation; Generalisation; Healthcare processes; Healthcare processes; Similarity metrics; Similarity metrics
In large organizations with multiple organizational units, process variants emerge due to many aspects, including local management policies, resources or socio-technical limitations. Organizations then struggle to improve a business process which has no longer a single process model to redesign, implement and adjust. In this paper, we propose an approach to tackle these two challenges: decrease the proliferation of process variants in these organizations, and foresee, at the same time, the need of having flexible business processes that allow for a certain degree of adjustment. To validate our approach, we first conducted case studies where we collected six real-world business process variants from two organizational units of the same healthcare organization. We then proposed an algorithm to derive a template process model from all the variants, which includes common and flexible process elements. We implemented our approach in a software tool called BPFlexTemplate, and tested it with the elicited variants.
