A Structural Analysis of Business Processes for Measuring the Impact of Reengineering

Abstrac .. Most efforts in business process reengineering to date are motivated by potential improvement in perfonnance measures such as costs, quality of products or services, and cycle time for their delivery. While obviously important, these factors do not necessarily reflect any intrinsic improvement in how work is organized. This paper presents an approach to the structural analysis of business processes. The goal is to capture an inherent degree of synchronization of the various interdependent activities involved. This way, the process before and after reengineering, or alternative designs, can be compared without arbitrary scaling effects introduced by nonstructural variables. Our methodology for modeling and analysis incorporates established techniques in fuzzy logic and systems. Its application to a well-known example is used as illustration.