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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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Automate activities

Consider automating activities

Combine activities

Combine small activities into composite activities

Assign cases

Let workers perform as many steps as possible for single cases

Work in customer teams

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

Outsource activities

Delegate and optimize your operations

Apply triage

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

Role-based task assignment

Assign tasks based on resources' roles in the organisation

Performance-based task assignment

Allocate tasks based on past performance: execution time and success

Quality-based task assignment

Allocate task based on past feedback or quality metrics

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