Towards a goal and problem based business process improvement framework – an experience report

The interest in business process improvement (BPI) is vast among researchers and practitioners. However, it is difficult for an organisation to understand which BPI methods to introduce given a situation at hand. This paper describes experiences from a major Swedish insurance company that carried out a BPI project but needed to know if further improvement could be achieved. In order to address this issue, a BPI framework was designed and applied on already improved business process diagrams. The BPI framework consists of various BPI tasks from different BPI methods, more precisely Six Sigma and Lean, and from research on so called duplicate systems. The framework also consists of goal and problem statements related to BPI tasks. These goals and problem statements aim to support the selection, combina-tion, and application of the BPI tasks given a situation at hand. The application of the BPI framework showed that several further improvements of already improved business processes diagrams could be achieved. An evaluation of the BPI framework based on interviews with academic experts and practitioners also showed promising results.