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
Reduce the number of contacts with customers and third parties
Empower workers for more decision-making authority
Design business processes for typical cases and isolate exceptional cases from the normal flow
Order knock-outs by least effort and highest termination probability first.
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Let products appear greener
Let customers interact with the company wherever they want to
Explore whether a process can easily be used for additional products or services
Allocate task based on past feedback or quality metrics