Service Process Improvement Based on Business Process Management

Service Process Improvement Based on Business Process Management

The service vendors desire to improve their service processes to retain consumers and increase profits. Most existing methods require a mass of domain knowledge to improve their service processes, which are time consuming and error-prone. This paper proposes a method named Diff-BPI to automatically improve a service process, reducing execution cost while guaranteeing consumers’ waiting/process time. Given the existing two versions of a service process, Diff-BPI first detects their differences and all possible candidate improved service processes are constructed by connecting their same parts and combinations of different parts. After that, Diff-BPI calculates three metrics for each candidate: “quality of improvement (QoI)”, “longest execution time (LET)” and “stability of time (SoT)”, and filters the candidates with LETs higher than the given time limit and QoIs/SoTs less than the given one. Finally, Diff-BPI picks the best candidate with the lowest cost less than the costs of two existing versions. A case study shows that Diff-BPI can construct an improved service process with a lower cost than the existing two versions. The efficiency evaluation reveals that Diff-BPI can save more than 20% of the running time for improving a service process using the filter strategy when the number of differences between the two versions is more than 3.