Marc Wouters

2015

An analytical approach for business processes performance evaluation and benchmarking is presented. The proposed method includes the development of an evaluation survey which integrates the Balanced Scorecard framework, a multi-attribute decision-making algorithm, and the consideration of several business process specific metrics. By incorporating lower-level department objectives and higher-level company goals, an in-depth evaluation and comparison of partner organizations is achieved. In order to uncover impact and importance of specific business processes steps, metrics such as process workload, headcount involved and turnaround times are integrated in this method. The proposed approach is then tested in a case study with three affiliated financial services companies in Asia. We found that this method helped prioritizing future operational improvements and visualized the importance and performance of process steps of the case companies. After introducing the method and applying it in the case, we present specific case findings and discuss the advantages of this approach, show outcomes for each of the three companies, and give future advice on using similar approaches. A reflection on potential pitfalls of the application of this approach is presented. This will discuss issues such as extensive efforts of assessments and mathematical perils of this method.