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
Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type
Determine whether activities are related to the same type of case and, if necessary, distinguish new business processes
Minimize numerical involvement
Too many cooks spoil the broth
Collect similar work items and work in batches
Automate for environmental impact
Implement automation in a sustainable way
Offer customers the possibility to serve themselves
Offer customers the possibility to choose among privacy settings
Distribute tasks by interdepartmental interactions to enable or restrict involvement