A Systematic Review of Business Process Improvement: Achievements and Potentials in Combining Concepts from Operations Research and Business Process Management

TL;DR

This paper systematically reviews how combining Business Process Management and Operations Research enhances organizational value, highlighting current approaches, limitations, and potential for integrating stochastic models and data-driven insights.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive analysis of existing work that merges concepts from both fields, identifying gaps and opportunities for future research.

Findings

Focus on resource allocation and scheduling problems

Limited support for stochastic and data-driven approaches

Current models lack integration of process logs and real-time data

Abstract

Business Process Management and Operations Research are two research fields that both aim to enhance value creation in organizations. While Business Process Management has historically emphasized on providing precise models, Operations Research has focused on constructing tractable models and their solutions. This systematic literature review identifies and analyzes work that uses combined concepts from both disciplines. In particular, it analyzes how business process models have been conceptualized as mathematical models and which optimization techniques have been applied to these models. Results indicate a strong focus on resource allocation and scheduling problems. Current approaches often lack support of the stochastic nature of many problems, and do only sparsely use information from process models or from event logs, such as resource-related information or information from the data perspective.