Analysis of techniques for business process improvement

This paper is about identifying and analyzing techniques that can be used in a business process improvement (BPI) situation. To determine suitable techniques, the term BPI is defined and criteria are derived to analyze the usability of the selected techniques. Over 300 techniques from various improvement methods were reduced to those techniques which can be applied to help improve business processes and, in particular, to support the act of improvement. Identifying these techniques is helpful, because in most cases the act of improvement is a black box that lacks guidelines or structured procedures. In our research we developed an evaluation scheme to analyze the usability of BPI techniques and give hints about how to select a suitable technique for a certain improvement situation.