Evaluation Of The Results Of Continuous Improvement Of Business Processes

The academia and enterprise circles have focused on BPR since the concept of BPR was put forward. However, the great majority of enterprises failed to implement BPR in practice. With the further research on BPR, people have found that the one-off and radical process reengineering could only have brought short-term benefits for enterprises, but continuous improvement of business processes could have brought the sustainable competence and advantage. Therefore, the concept of BPM which embodies the thought of reengineering and continuous improvement was proposed. This thesis uses the theory of BPR, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Gray Relevance Analysis (GRA) to study the evaluation of the results of business process continuous improvement. The thesis analyzes and finds out the critical success factors and the main barriers that processes are continuously improved on the basis of the theory of System Dynamics (SD). And then the thesis sets up an evaluation index system of the effect of continuous improvement of business processes. The thesis expects that evaluating the results of continuously improving processes would provide enterprises with the basis and direction to set down their strategies about process change. Consequently, enterprises can continuously improve their performance and keep their competence sustainable.Firstly, the thesis sums up the relevant theories and methods. The thesis indicates that it is inevitable that summarizing and analyzing the theory about division of labor during the industrial economy lead to BPR appearing. The features of BPR are that it regards processes as its object of reengineering, customer's requirements as its starting point and the remarkable improvement of performance as its objective. However, it is impossible for an enterprise to reengineer its entire processes. So choosing the processes to be reengineered becomes the chief problem in the BPR implementation. The thesis expounds the methods of choosing the key business processes, including performance/importance matrix and the process prioritization. And the methods of redesigning processes include"eliminate","integrate","simplify","specify","IT improvement"and"comprehensive method". The thesis gives the concept of BPM on the basis of reviewing the concepts of BPM proposed by other scholars. The thesis defines BPM as follows: Business Process management (BPM) is a customer-oriented management system that achieves cross-functional and cross-departmental integration and cooperation by standardizing, optimizing and reengineering business processes. BPM systematically manages its every stage, including planning, designing, constructing, transforming and evaluating stage and so on. BPM regards continuously enhancing organizational performance and value adding abilities of business processes as its goal. BPM stresses continuous improvements in processes and business performance, but BPR stresses the fundamental and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in business performance. Then the thesis reviews the stage theory of BPR implementation and BPM implementation. And the thesis sums up the power of continuous improvement (CI) from learning, profit, competition, customer and quality perspectives on the basis of analyzing the barriers of CI. The thesis points out that the unifications between CI and BPR are that they have common goals, unified process and integrating CI into BPR can make the enterprise achieve permanent optimizing. The thesis summarizes the critical factors about successful implementation of BPR and process change, expounds the concept of System Dynamics (SD), its way and method of resolving problems. And the thesis elaborates relevant principles and methods of the causal feedback loop. Then the thesis points out that how to decide index's weight and sums up four comprehensive evaluation methods, including AHP, GRA, DEA and FCE.The thesis sets up the model of the BPM life cycle. And the life cycle is composed of four stages, viz. initiation, restructuring, implementation and evaluation. According to the four stages of implementing BPM, the thesis summarizes and lists the corresponding critical factors for process improvement. Thus the thesis sets up a casual model for continuously improving business processes. By analyzing the model, the thesis indicates: In the initiation stage, insight of leaders is a key success factor of initiating the BPM project. Effectively reducing and avoiding resistance from various levels of the enterprise can ensure the enterprise to successfully implement and control the BPM project. The increase of organizational performance because of implementing BPM is a positive and internal factor of starting the project. In the restructuring stage,"resistance to change"and"task complexity"are the main barriers of continuous improvement to overcome; the enhancement on"resource effective allocation"and"human resource structure fit"is the target of process diagnosis and improvement. In the implementation stage,"Resistance to change"is a main barrier to overcome in the initiating stage;"Organizational learning capability"and"training investment"can ensure the BPM project to be successfully implemented. Namely the key of implementation of the BPM project: The enterprise strengthens employee's training in knowledge about the process change, which transforms the enterprise into a learning organization with the powerful competence. Meanwhile, the enterprise can ensure the new processes, new organization structure and information system to smoothly run in management. The active factors of BPM implementation are improvement of"organizational performance", desire for"organizational vision and strategy", pressure from"management intensity"and demand for"new management thinking and technology". However, the effect of implementing BPM cause the decrease of"management intensity", which is an inertial factor of further implementing BPM.The thesis indicates that designing and choosing the evaluation indices about the effect of continuous improvement of business processes should comply with scientific principle, objective principle and comprehensive principle and so on. And the thesis sets up an evaluation index system of the results of continuous improvement of business processes on the basis of analyzing the critical factors for business process improvement, consulting experts'opinion as well as reviewing and summarizing the massive references. The system includes three levels. The first level of the system includes the performance of business processes, the integrated degree between the organization and its processes as well as the effect of knowledge management. And the performance of business processes includes the indices such as process effectiveness, process efficiency and process flexibility. The integrated degree between the organization and its processes includes the indices such as organizational cohesion, the integration of the organization and its processes, human resource structure and training as well as the makings and behavior of leaders. The effect of knowledge management includes the indices such as process knowledge acquirement, process knowledge transfer and process knowledge share as well as process knowledge innovation. These indices in the second level of the system include respective indices. And the third level of the system includes twenty-eight indices. In addition, the thesis elaborates every index in different levels of the system. And the thesis points out the steps towards evaluating the effect of continuously improving business processes are to determine the evaluation object, to set up the evaluation index system through Delphi method, to determine the weight of every index through AHP and standardize the values of the indices, to set up the evaluation model through GRA and to analyze the results of evaluating process continuous improvement.Finally, the thesis takes A company as a case and amply analyzes continuous improvements in the sale outbound process in the company through time motion study. And the thesis evaluates the effect of continuous improvements in the process by using the evaluation index system and the evaluation model that the thesis set up. Then the thesis analyzes the results of evaluation through performance/importance matrix and makes some suggestions to continuously improve the company's processes.