CBR-BPR: A CASE-BASED REASONING TOOL FOR BUISNESS

PROCESS REDESIGN

Farhi Marir and Selma Limam Mansar

Department of Computing, London Metropolitan University, Holloway Road,London N7 8DB, UK.

eywords: Case-based management, Business process redesign, workflow, Best practices, Knowledge management

Abstract: This paper presents a new approach for business processes redesign (BPR). The approach uses case-based

reasoning techniques to model past business redesign into a case or stories based on a developed BPR

framework and best practices rules. The resulting case base of past failing or successful experiences will be

used to support business process designer and practitioner in redesigning or improving existing business

processes. This work came to address the limitation of most methodologies developed to support the

application of BPR principles in providing clear guidance on deriving a process design threatening the

success of BPR.

1 INTRODUCTION

Business Process Redesign (BPR) addresses the

reengineering of one specific process within the

firm. It distinguishes itself from Business Process

Reengineering where the focus is rather on

developing a “business architecture”, which later

requires in depth re-thinking and re-assessment of

the firm’s mission and of the processes required in

order to fulfil it, (Edward et al., 1994). So BPR helps

rethinking a process in order to enhance its

performance. Academics and business practitioners

have been developing methodologies to support the

application of BPR principles (for an overview: see

Kettinger et al. 1997). However, most

methodologies generally lack actual guidance on

deriving a process design threatening the success of

BPR. Indeed a survey has proved that 85% of

projects fail or experience problems (Crowe et al.,

2002).

The work presented in this paper aims to

overcome this problem through the use of case-

based reasoning technology enhanced with a

framework for BPR implementation which allows

the recognition of important topics and their

relationships and also the best practices which

defines rules to be applied to redesign a process for

each topic of this framework developed in (Limam

et al., 2002).

There are many arguments supporting using

CBR against other knowledge-based methodologies

(Luger 2002). However our main interest in CBR

relies in that it allows a system to avoid past failures

and exploit past successes. CBR can provide a

model of learning that is both theoretically

interesting and practical enough to apply to complex

problems. This is a key issue in business process

redesign where practice has proved that successes

are few and failures quite common (Crowe et al.

2002). Being able to learn form past experiences

could then be of great added value for whoever is

involved in the redesign of a similar process with

similar goals and targets. Another argument in

favour of using CBR for BPR implementation is

that, traditionally, redesign has been the area of

consultants and “experts” in the field. Thus, redesign

is often the result of the application of so-called

“best practices” rather than on the use of analytical

methods (theoretical models and heuristics) to derive

improved or redesigned processes (Reijers et al.

2003). Some authors are working on the

development of such analytical tools. However none

of them is currently capable of dealing with every

particular aspect of a redesigned business processes.

In fact much of the redesign still rely on past

experiences and on the application of the

aforementioned best practices. In this context, CBR

can be viewed as a good compromise between a

completely empirical study and redesign of business

processes and a pure analytical method. CBR can

support the redesign process by finding similar

cases: experts or consultants can then compare and

learn which best practices to apply and also,

hopefully avoid past mistakes.

The purpose of this research is to develop a tool

that would allow practitioners to access previous

363

Marir F. and Limam Mansar S. (2004).

CBR-BPR: A CASE-BASED REASONING TOOL FOR BUISNESS PROCESS REDESIGN.

In Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems, pages 363-368

DOI: 10.5220/0002639403630368

 SciTePress

redesign projects and, possibly, reapply some of the

best findings. Although CBR is useful for the reuse,

it has not been applied for business process redesign.

However, CBR has been employed successfully for

other similar activities such as workflow design

(using a clean-sheet approach) (Kim et al. 2002),

concurrent product development (Haque et al. 2000)

and business automation (Cheung et al. 2003).

The paper is divided into three main sections.

Section one is devoted to the representation of the

business process case, which is developed using

ReMind Version 1.1 (a CBR tool produced by

Cognitive Systems Inc.) (Watson, 1997). This

section describes how the business framework and

best practice rules are modelled into a case. The

second section is devoted to the description of the

indices taken from the framework and the best

practice rules for the CBR-BPR case, and the third

section is devoted to the BPR-CBR case retrieval.

However, the last two sections are devoted to the

conclusion and references respectively.

2 REPRESENTATION OF A

BUSINESS PROCESS CASE

A case is a contextualised piece of knowledge

representing an experience. It contains the past lesson

that is the content of the case and the context in which

the lesson can be used (Marir et al., 1994). Typically a

business process case comprises four components as

shown in Figure 1 (See Limam et al., 2003 for more

details) :

• The features that define the context of the

business processes e.g. business area, business

sub area, and the business process itself,

• The business best practice rules applied on the

components that compose the proposed business

process framework,

• The business process solution which states the

solution to previous experiences and

• The goals and targets that characterise the

improvement brought by previous BPR solutions

e.g. reducing time and cost, etc…

Figure 1: Framework business process case and its business process best practice rules

2.1 The Context of the BPR Case

This part of the case describes the context of the

business process by specifying the business area

such as manufacturing, banking finance, and mining

oil, the business sub area such as cars, aeronautics,

and textile and most importantly the business

process itself e.g. invoicing, advertising, and

inventory management.

2.2 BPR Framework

The idea behind a framework is to help practitioners

by identifying the topics that should be considered

and how these topics are related (Alter 1999). In this

perspective, the framework should identify clearly

all views one should consider whenever applying a

BPR implementation project. The framework is

derived as a synthesis of the Work-Centered-

Analysis framework (Alter 1999), the MOBILE

workflow model (Jablonski et al. 1996), the

CIMOSA enterprise modelling views (Beriot et. al.

2001) and the process description classes of

(Seidmann et al. 1997). The proposed framework

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contains six linked elements are linked: the

customers of the business process, the products (or

services) generated by the business process, the

business process with two views, the operation

view: how is a business process implemented?

(Number of tasks in a job, relative size of tasks,

nature of tasks, degree of customisation), the

behaviour view: when is a business process

executed? (Sequencing of tasks, task consolidation,

scheduling of jobs, etc.), the participants in the

business process considering the organisation

structure (elements: roles, users, groups,

departments, etc.) and the organisation population

(individuals: agents which can have tasks assigned

for execution and relationships between them), the

information the business process uses or creates, the

technology the business process uses and finally, the

external environment other than the customers.

Customers

Products

Organisation

-Structure

-Population

Inform ation

Technology

EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

Operation view

Business process

Behavioural view

Customers

Products

Organisation

-Structure

-Population

Inform ation

Technology

Organisation

-Structure

-Population

Inform ation

Technology

EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

Operation view

Business process

Behavioural view

Figure 2: Framework for BPR implementation

2.3 Best Practice Rules

As mentioned above, our BPR implementation

approach is based on a framework and on a set of

BPR best practices. Over the last twenty years, best

practices have been collected and applied in various

areas, such as business planning, healthcare,

manufacturing, and the software development

process (e.g. Martin 1978, Butler 1996, Golovin

1997). In Table 1, we present the surveyed best

practices rules, which can actually support the re-

designer of a business process tackling the technical

BPR challenge of implementing an improved

process design. These best practice rules are

classified to evolve around the component of the

adopted BPR framework because improving the

redesign of a process is a matter of improving any of

these components.

Table 1: BPR best practices classified according to our BPR implementation framework

Framework elements Best practice name

Customers Control relocation, Contact reduction and Integration

Products NONE.

Operation view Order types, Task elimination, Order-based work, Triage and Task

composition

Behavioural view Re-sequencing, Parallelism, Knock-out, and Exception

External environment Trusted party, Outsourcing and Interfacing

Organisation: structure Order assignment, Flexible assignment, Centralisation, Split,

responsibilities, Customer teams, Numerical involvement and Case

manager

Organisation: Population Extra resources, Specialist-generalist, Empower and Control addition

Information Buffering

Technology Task automation, Integral Business Process and Technology

CBR-BPR: A CASE-BASED REASONING TOOL FOR BUSiNESS PROCESS REDESIGN

365

2.4 Goals and Targets

Different goals might lead to completely different

redesign options. (Brand and Van der Kolk 1995)

demonstrate this issue using their "devil's

quadrangle". The authors distinguish four main

dimensions in the effects of redesign measures: time,

cost, quality, and flexibility. Ideally, a redesign of a

business process decreases the time required to

handle an order, it decreases the required cost of

executing the business process, it improves the

quality of the service delivered, and it improves the

ability of the business process to react to variation.

The attractive property of their model is that, in

general, improving upon one dimension may have a

weakening effect on another. In order to reflect this

difficult reconciliation between the targets and goals

of the BPR implementation, it is important to

include it as part of a case's characteristics. Figure 3

below shows some of the targets and goals

classification adapted from (Guimaraes and Bond

1996).

Figure 3: Goals and targets for BPR implementation (adapted from Guimaraes and Bond 1996)

3 BPR CASE INDEXING

Case indexing involves assigning indices to cases to

facilitate their retrieval. Since there are two different

ways of retrieving cases, the case indexing of CBR-

BPR system is designed using two different schemes

(Figure 4) to cope with both views:

- If a practitioner wishes to apply a given set rule

and would like to retrieve cases where similar

rules were applied. In this case the business

process context (business area, business sub

area and business process) and the rules are

used as indices for the BPR case.

- If a practitioner doesn't know which rule to

apply and would like to retrieve cases where

similar business processes have been

redesigned. In this case the business process

context and the goals and targets are used as

indices for the BPR case.

Figure 4: Inductive and nearest neighbour indexing techniques

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4 BPR CASE RETRIEVAL

The retrieval algorithm relies on the indices set in

the previous section to direct the search to

potentially useful cases. As shown in the case

indexing, the current process and the problems those

need to be addressed (reducing costs, improving the

quality, etc.) are known, a consultant might whish to

know whether similar processes with similar

problems have been already redesigned. He might

wish to find out which best practices rules have been

applied to solve that problem and the technical and

organisational solutions adopted in that previous

case. In this instance, the inductive algorithm with

BPR solution as its and business context (business,

are, business sub area) and goals and targets indices

are used to retrieve the rules as shown in Figure 5

below. However, in the situation where the

consultant has already an idea about some rules he

wished to apply but he is not sure about the impact

of applying them, or he wants ideas about possible

adopted solutions. The nearest neighbour algorithm

uses the best practice rules and the context of the

business process as indexes to retrieve business

process solution applied in similar business

processes, with a similar problem and similar rules

applied.

Figure 5: Retrieval process and the explanation path

5 CONCLUSION

In this paper we have presented the use of case-

based reasoning for the reuse of previous business

process redesign to design or improve an existing

business process (sharing and adapting previous

practices). This includes collecting the knowledge

and storing it into the case base and making it

available do that knowledge about BPR is shared,

adapted and applied to new situations. This is a

novel approach to BPR and has not been explored

before. We have demonstrated through case

representation, case indexing and retrieval that

applying CBR is possible for BPR implementation

and would benefit business process re-designers.

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