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Eliminate activities

Eliminate unnecessary activities

Eliminate non-value adding practices

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

A common way of regarding a activity as unnecessary is when it adds no value from a client's point of view. Typically, control activity in a workflow do not do this; they are incorporated in the model to fix problems created or not elevated in earlier steps. Control activities can often be found back as iterations and reconciliation tasks.

The heuristic is widespread in literature, for example see Peppard and Rowland (1995), Berg and Pottjewijd (1997), and Van der Aalst and Van Hee (2002). Buzacott (1996) illustrates the quantitative effects of eliminating iterations with a simple model.

Performance considerations

The aims of this heuristic are to increase the speed of processing and to reduce the cost of handling a case. An important drawback may be that the quality of the service deteriorates.

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Foundational free Patterns

Automate activities

Consider automating activities

Reduce touchpoints

Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties

Work in customer teams

Form cross-department teams for end-to-end case handling.

Establish standardized interfaces

Consider a standardized interface with customers and partners

Split responsibilities

Avoid shared responsibilities for tasks by people from different functional units

Consolidate Work

Collect similar work items and work in batches

Preference-based task assignment

Let people do what they love to do

Constraint-based task assignment

Allocate tasks considering business process execution constraints

Department-based assignment

Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement

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