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)
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.
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.
Foundational free Patterns
Consider automating activities
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties
Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow
Collect similar work items and work in batches
Replace underlying resources with eco-friendly alternatives
Automate for environmental impact
Implement automation in a sustainable way
Reassign tasks along the organisational hierarchy
Experience-based task assignment
Delegate task according to experience: execution frequency, case involvement, interactions
Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement