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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

Appoint case managers

Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type

Work in customer teams

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

Deploy extra resources

If capacity is insufficient, consider increasing the available number of resources

Fail Early

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

Resequence activities

Move activities to more appropriate places

Offer location flexibility

Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to

Offer temporal flexibility

Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.

Generalize your process

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

Department-based assignment

Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement

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