Developing and tailoring business process management methods using the situational method engineering approach

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Effective business process management is one of the key tasks of every organization if it wants to compete successfully on the market and satisfy the needs of its customers. Although there are many established best practices, techniques, and more or less complex methods in business process management, no approach can fulfill a typical organization’s needs and wants. The key to success lies in developing new or adapting existing approaches for business process management to suit the unique characteristics of individual organizations and projects. This demands a solid methodological framework and a clearly defined work process. The aim of the paper is to apply situational method engineering concepts within the realm of business process management, thereby tackling the challenge mentioned above. As a result, a situational method engineering framework is defined to construct and customize business process management methods. The study proposes the conceptual foundations of the framework and a set of processes for constructing holistic and tailored methods that cover various aspects of business process management (analysis, modeling, management, etc.). The basis of the framework is represented by general method components at a higher level of abstraction, which are assembled into holistic methods via interfaces and are transformed into versions adapted to specific situations using tailoring rules. The practical applicability of the proposed framework is validated through its implementation in a project at a large manufacturing company, where it is used to develop both a general and customized business process management method.

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    • Figure 1. External view meta-model
    • Figure 2. A set of method component elements
    • Figure 3. Internal view meta-model of method components
    • Figure 4. Meta-model of method component interface
    • Figure 5. Meta-model of tailoring method components
    • Figure 6. Construction of a general method component
    • Figure 7. Construction of a general BPM method
    • Figure 8. Construction of tailored BPM method
    • Figure 9. A general BPM method as a set of interdependent general method components
    • Figure 10. A tailored BPM method as a set of interdependent tailored method components
    • Figure 11. A process of the innovation tailored method component
    • Conceptualization
      Sebastian Lahajnar
    • Data curation
      Sebastian Lahajnar, Alenka Rožanec
    • Formal Analysis
      Sebastian Lahajnar, Alenka Rožanec
    • Investigation
      Sebastian Lahajnar
    • Methodology
      Sebastian Lahajnar, Alenka Rožanec
    • Resources
      Sebastian Lahajnar, Alenka Rožanec
    • Software
      Sebastian Lahajnar
    • Validation
      Sebastian Lahajnar
    • Visualization
      Sebastian Lahajnar, Alenka Rožanec
    • Writing – original draft
      Sebastian Lahajnar, Alenka Rožanec
    • Writing – review & editing
      Sebastian Lahajnar, Alenka Rožanec
    • Supervision
      Alenka Rožanec