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Parallelize activities

Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel

Reijers, H., & Liman Mansar, S. (2005). Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics. Omega, 33(4)

category: Business Process Behavior
class: Routing Rules
frameworkAspect: Behavioral view
redesignOperation: Parallelize
perspective: control-flow

Description

The heuristic is mentioned by Rupp and Russell (1994), Berg and Pottjewijd (1997), and Van der Aalst and Van Hee (2002). Van der Aalst (2000b) provides quantitative support for this heuristic.

Performance considerations

The obvious effect of applying this heuristic is that the throughput time may be considerably reduced. The applicability of the heuristic in workflow redesign is large. In practical experiences we have had with analyzing existing workflows, tasks were mostly ordered sequentially without the existence of hard logical restrictions prescribing such an order.

A drawback of introducing more parallelism in a workflow that incorporates possibilities of knock-outs is that the cost of workflow execution may increase. The management of workflows with concurrent behavior can become more complex also, which may introduce errors (quality) or restrict run-time adaptations (flexibility).

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Foundational free Patterns

Appoint case managers

Assign a responsible individual for handling each case type

Distinguish case types

Determine whether activities are related to the same type of case and, if necessary, distinguish new business processes

Apply Integral technology

Elevate physical constraints by applying new technology

Minimize numerical involvement

Too many cooks spoil the broth

Parallelize activities

Consider whether activities may be executed in parallel

Apply triage

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

Green Variant

Offer a green alternative with the same outcome, utilizing different steps, resources, or partners, while retaining the previous existing process

Offer temporal flexibility

Let customers interact with your organization whenever they want to.

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Resequence activities

Move activities to more appropriate places

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