How do you like this site? We would love to hear from you! Take a short survey or

Distinguish case types

Determine whether activities are related to the same type of case and, if necessary, distinguish new business processes

Reijers, H., & Liman Mansar, S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4)

Description

One should be cautious of parts of business processes that are not specific for the business process they are part of. Ignoring this phenomenon may result in a less effective management of such a sub-process and a lower efficiency. Applying this heuristic may result in faster processing times and less cost.

Especially Berg and Pottjewijd (1997) convincingly warn for parts of business processes that are not specific for the business process they are part of. Ignoring this phenomenon may result in a less effective management of this "subflow" and a lower efficiency.

Note that this heuristic is in some sense similar to the triage concept. The main interpretation of the triage concept can be seen as a translation of the case type pattern on a activity level.

Performance considerations

Applying this best practice may yield faster processing times and less cost. Also, distinguishing common subflows of many different flows may yield effciency gains. Yet, it may also result in more coordination problems between the business process (quality) and less possibilities for rearranging the business process as a whole (flexibility).

Share this pattern

Enjoy these

Foundational free Patterns

Buffer information

Buffer external information and subscribe to updates

Isolate exceptions

Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow

Fail Early

Order knock-outs by least effort and highest termination probability first.

Green Compensation

Start implementing actions that can offset or counterbalance the environmental effects generated by business processes that cannot be changed.

Offer location flexibility

Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to

Generalize your process

Explore whether a process can easily be used for additional products or services

Preference-based task assignment

Let people do what they love to do

Cost-based task assignment

Delegate tasks according to resource cost

Teamwork-based assignment

Allocate task based on collaborative experience: handover time, interactions, diversity

Back

Share this

Connected to

Apply triage

Consider the division of a general activity into two or more alternative activities

Assign cases

Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases

Establish a case-based mindset

Remove batch-processing and periodic activities from your business process

What's Happening?