Improving Business Processes: The RePro Technique

This article discusses the RePro technique for improving business processes, which allows practitioners to choose from a wide range of alternatives for redesigning their processes. The article compares the RePro technique to traditional brainstorming and presents experiment findings that show the RePro technique to be more efficient and effective. The article also discusses the principles and process improvement procedure of the RePro technique.

Business Process Engineering
Improving Business Processes: Does anybody have an Idea? Rob J. B. Vanwersch, Irene
Vanderfeesten, Eric Rietzschel, Hajo A. Reijers
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Introduction
This paper will review Business Process Management proceedings of the 13th
International Conference which was conducted in the year 2015 in Innsbruck, specifically on the
article of Improving Business Processes. The article talks more about the techniques of
redesigning business processes and ensuring an improvement in the processes. It brings about a
new technique of ensuring that there is an improvement of business process known as Rethinking
of Processes. In this case, the content of this article, the research method which was used and its
findings will be discussed. The relevance of this article to business process management will also
be explained. Related articles will be used in order to develop a substantial and significant
review essay.
Vanwersch et al, (2015, p. 4) suggest that the process of redesigning business processes is
very significant because it is through this process that the business weaknesses are identified,
costs of the business processes are reduced and the customer satisfaction is improved. In the
process of redesigning, the business processes are first described and analyzed where the
weaknesses are identified and then the necessary improvements are made (Grant, 2016). In most
cases, brainstorming, which is a traditional technique of business redesigning, has been used by
many businesses. However, Sanford, (2017) argue that this brainstorming technique is not very
convenient nor very effective. This is because it does not allow the practitioners to identify
several possible alternatives that can be used to redesign the business processes; it is just fixed to
only one technique of business process redesign.
The Traditional Brainstorming technique leads the practitioners to biases and prevents
them from identifying and considering other possible choices or alternatives of redesigning
(McCabe, 2014). The Rethinking of Processes is an alternative technique which is more efficient
than the traditional brainstorming technique. The Rethinking of Processes is mostly shortened
and termed as RePro. It allows for practitioners in businesses to choose from a wide range of
alternatives for redesigning their business processes, which is an opposing aspect in the
Traditional Brainstorming technique. (Ferretti and Schiavone, 2016). In addition, through RePro,
practitioners are relieved of the costs, time and procedures of hiring experts or consultants to
help them in finding and identifying better, attractive and applicable redesigns of the business
process. Vanwersch et al, (2015, p. 4) have only named and highlighted two business process
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redesign techniques. However, Kettinger, Teng, and Guha, (2013, p. 56) suggest that there are
more than ten techniques which can be practiced in various areas like in the process of software
development, in manufacturing, in the planning of businesses as well as in healthcare.
The RePro technique was developed as an alternative to the Traditional Brainstorming
technique. It makes use of principles which are seen as solutions which have been put into
application earlier and found to be applicable in other settings. All the RePro principles are 46 in
number and are classified into 9 categories which are designed in favor of the aspects or
conditions of the business process which can be subjected to improvement (Vanwersch et al,
2015, p. 8). Apart from the principles, the RePro technique makes use of a process improvement
procedure which allows for systematic analysis of the principles in order to identify the best
solution which fits into a particular problem. This procedure starts by introducing and explaining
the procedure, followed by the generation of ideas, idea sharing, discussion of the limitations of
the ideas and finally assigning ranks to the generated ideas.
The evidence of the efficiency of RePro has been brought up through a controlled
experiment research design which compares and evaluates its performance with the Traditional
Brainstorming technique. The experiment used 89 students who were Industrial Engineering
graduates. However, these experiment participants had no experience in the generation of
process redesigns; they were not experts and therefore, they could have not provided the relevant
and useful findings and conclusions (Vanwersch et al, 2015, p. 15). They were however
subjected to a short training on process modeling in order to equip them with relevant knowledge
and skills which would help them in the proceedings of the experiment.
The task of the experiment involved generating improvement ideas on the process of
performing a surgery on patients with eye cataracts. Cataracts of the eye are caused by the
blocking or clouding of the eye lens which results to decrease in the ability of vision (Vanwersch
et al, 2015, p. 12). The authors of this article worked with the selected participants to ensure
efficiency of the experiment where they laid out the objectives of the redesign, the limitations of
the redesigns and also considered the problems that were identified by patients as well as the
employees (Vanwersch et al, 2015, p. 11). A pre-test, as well as a pilot study, were carried out
before the real experiment in order to evaluate the understandability of the description by the
participants and also to estimate the time required to complete the entire experiment. Some
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participants were exposed to use the traditional brainstorming redesign technique while others
were subjected to the use of the RePro redesign technique. Afterward, participants on both
redesign techniques were asked to come up with as many ideas for process improvement as
possible and project their expected possible impact when the ideas are applied. The number of
distinct and unique ideas that were generated by the participants were used to measure the extent
or the level of productivity. Questionnaires that used the Likert scale of seven points were
subjected to the participants in order to determine which technique was more applicable, relevant
and effective in the process improvement (Vanwersch et al, 2015, p. 16).
In the findings, the study found out that the unique process improvement ideas that were
generated in the RePro technique by each individual were averagely 17.82 while those generated
in the Traditional Brainstorming technique were averagely 14.57 (Vanwersch et al, 2015, p. 17).
It is evident that the participants who used the RePro technique generated more process
improvement ideas than those who used the Traditional Brainstorming technique. Using the
Likert scale of seven points from the questionnaires that were subjected to the participants, the
level of satisfaction of the process redesign techniques was measured where the level of
satisfaction in the use of the RePro technique was 5.3 while that of the Traditional Brainstorming
technique was 4.7 (Vanwersch et al, 2015, p. 14).
Testing the willingness and intention of the participants to use the techniques, it was
found that participants who had a positive intention were 82%, 14% were neutral while 4% were
negative to having an intention of using the RePro technique (Vanwersch et al, 2015, p. 15). It
was observed that the participants made use of two styles of starting the RePro technique in this
experiment. In the first style, which was named as the opportunity-centric generation style, the
participants went through the principles of RePro technique carefully with an intention to
identify opportunities which could need the application of one or more of the principles. On the
second style, which was termed as the problem-centric generation style, the participants first
identified the problems or weaknesses which were stated in the case description and then went
through the principles of the RePro technique in order to match any possible and relevant
solution (Vanwersch et al, 2015, p. 16).
Moreover, it was found that the participants who used the opportunity-centric generation
style came up with 67% more process redesign ideas than those who used the problem-centric
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generation style as well as those who used the Traditional Brainstorming technique (Vanwersch
et al, 2015, p. 18). However, it was critiqued that when individuals are exposed to many
solutions or alternatives, they tend to get overwhelmed hence they eventually fail to apply the
most relevant and applicable solution in adequacy (Vanwersch et al, 2014). This experiment did
not investigate the effect that the different styles of using RePro technique have on productivity
in the business sector. Nevertheless, these findings give us the sense that the RePro technique is
more efficient and relevant to business processes than the Traditional Brainstorming technique.
There have been other many techniques of process improvement for quite some time
apart from the Traditional Brainstorming and the RePro technique (Rosemann and Vom Brocke,
2015). However, this experiment is the first attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of process
improvement techniques to productivity among all other techniques. Kettinger, Teng, and Guha,
(2013, p. 62) argues that there has not been found specific studies that are related to business
process redesign. Additionally, there has not been an identified method that tells when to
redesign business processes (McCormack and Johnson, 2016). In contrast, Van der Aalst, (2013)
proposes the Critical Process Instance Method which predicts the time at which deep analysis
should be carried out using a certain number of business process instances. However, a more
advanced and sophisticated experiment needs to be carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of
this RePro technique as well as the impact of other possible styles of applying this RePro
technique.
The RePro technique qualifies to be very significant in any business process management
because it allows the practitioners or business managers to select solutions to the existing
problems in the business process. This then helps the entire business process to avoid excessive
costs, ensure the satisfaction of the customers and also reduce time wastage in the overall
activities of the business. Sadiq and Governatori, (2015, p. 70) indicate that redesigning business
processes help them to survive in the competitive market. It also propagates the achievements of
the goals and objectives of the business (Chang, 2016).
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Conclusion
Through the above discussions, it is evident that the traditional techniques of business
process redesign have been greatly overtaken by the RePro technique. Despite the fact that the
RePro technique is not accurately reliable in reference to the research design that was used, it
still remains to be more efficient than the Traditional Brainstorm technique. More research,
however, will extend the reliability of this technique.
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References
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