Towards successful business process improvement - An extension of change acceleration process model

Process improvement of a paediatric feeding clinic

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to identify opportunities to improve processes within a paediatric feeding clinic to enhance timely patient access to healthcare through effective and efficient resource use.

Design/methodology/approach

The study involved three interrelated methods. First, de-identified feeding clinic data, collected over seven years, were analysed to understand patient appointments. Second, clinician workshops and the swim lane method were used to map feeding clinic processes. Third, root cause analysis was conducted to identify bottlenecks and identify improvement opportunities.

Findings

The results revealed three, poorly connected sub-processes within the feeding clinic - namely: the patient triaging and appointment scheduling or allocation process; the clinic reporting process; and the cancellation and rescheduling process. These sub-processes were poorly connected because of inadequate resources, few standardised processes, and limited coordination between the different processes. Consequently, patient appointments were typically delayed, and patient reports were not always completed in a timely manner. Processes within the paediatric feeding clinic could therefore be improved by using digital tools, patient portals and telehealth, online interventions, an automated appointment confirmation system, and/or an automated transcription of each appointment.

Originality/value

This is the first published study to apply business process management to a paediatric feeding clinic. By using three methods to clarify opportunities to improve clinic processes, it highlights the potential value of health information technology in this context. This evidence will enable health service managers to ensure that children with feeding difficulties have timely access to appropriate care.

Prediction and Big Data Impact Analysis of Telecom Churn by Backpropagation Neural Network Algorithm from the Perspective of Business Model

This study aims to transform the existing telecom operators from traditional Internet operators to digital-driven services, and improve the overall competitiveness of telecom enterprises. Data mining is applied to telecom user classification to process the existing telecom user data through data integration, cleaning, standardization, and transformation. Although the existing algorithms ensure the accuracy of the algorithm on the telecom user analysis platform under big data, they do not solve the limitations of single machine computing and cannot effectively improve the training efficiency of the model. To solve this problem, this article establishes a telecom customer churn prediction model with the help of backpropagation neural network (BPNN) algorithm, and deploys the MapReduce programming framework on Hadoop platform. Using the data of a telecom company, this article analyzes the loss of telecom customers in the big data environment. The research shows that the accuracy of telecom customer churn prediction model in BPNN is 82.12%. After deploying large data sets, the learning and training time of the model is greatly shortened. When the number of nodes is 8, the acceleration ratio of the model remains at 60 seconds. Under big data, the telecom user analysis platform not only ensures the accuracy of the algorithm, but also solves the limitations of single machine computing and effectively improves the training efficiency of the model. Compared with that of the existing research, the accuracy of the model is improved by 25.36%, and the running time is shortened by about twice. This business model based on BPNN algorithm has obvious advantages in processing more data sets, and has great reference value for the digital-driven business model transformation of the telecommunications industry.

Policy Intervention and Financial Sustainability in an Emerging Economy: A Structural Vector Auto Regression Analysis

The purpose of the study is to observe the impact of policy intervention on financial sustainability using the structural vector autoregression (SVAR) analysis. The population of the study is the manufacturing sector of Pakistan, which is an emerging economy. Data for 249 firms operating in the manufacturing sector are taken, collected from Datastream from 2005 to 2019, with total observations of 2,400. To conduct the analysis, R software is used for its better visualization. Results show that firm performance, corporate governance, and sectoral policies have a positive and long-term impact on financial sustainability, whereas earning management and financialization not only have a negative impact, but this impact affects the operations of the corporate for a longer period. This study would be helpful for policymakers as it gives a framework for financial sustainability based on the policies and strategies developed by the sector.

Modeling the Relationship between Business Process Reengineering and Organizational Culture

Business process reengineering (BPR) has been widely known for its effectiveness in generating chances for organizational improvement. Understanding and modeling the relationship between the factors that contribute to the BPR and organizational culture (OC) is critical for the success of its implementation. This paper introduces a fuzzy-based analytical hierarchy process, named FAHP, for integrating the factors affecting BPR with OC to ensure the BPR’s success. First, a real case study was conducted to investigate the operational effectiveness and applicability of the proposed approach. Then, the BPR factors were validated and prioritized by a panel of experts from the American Society for Quality (ASQ) members network-Qatar chapter and a group of quality directors in Qatar. On the other side, the OC factors were investigated via a systematic literature review. Finally, an analytical correlation study was conducted to understand the relationship between the corresponding factors better. The correlation analysis study has shown that the organizational strategy, leadership, and transfer of knowledge are highly correlated with respect to people, innovation, and supportiveness. The team orientation, outcome orientation, and attention to detail factors have a medium correlation with the BPR factors. Moreover, the aggressiveness showed a weak correlation with all the BPR factors. The outcomes of this study provide decision-makers with guidelines for successful integration of the BPR and OC factors to ensure effective implementation of the BPR initiatives.

Do Embedded and Peripheral Corporate Social Responsibility Activities Lower Employees' Turnover Intentions?

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) remains a topic of interest for both theory and practice due to its multifaceted avenues and potential for growth. We have chosen embedded CSR and peripheral CSR measures to evaluate how these activities affect the employee turnover intentions via a mediation mechanism of organizational citizenship behavior (OCB). In doing so, this study addresses important stakeholder concerns and provides meaningful managerial contributions for the employers to encourage more employee participation (through lowering turnover intention) toward sustainable corporate performance. This study incorporates four hypotheses that are tested in a structural equation modeling framework by employing Warp-PLS software. Data were collected from 297 employees working in firms that are renowned for their CSR initiatives. We found support for our key hypotheses leading to strong theoretical contributions to the stakeholder theory. We have addressed the main issues of stakeholders' response to the CSR tradeoffs and have tried to develop a deeper understanding of managers in initiating peripheral and embedded CSR activities for their firms.

Business Process Re-Engineering: A Literature Review-Based Analysis of Implementation Measures

Business process re-engineering (BPR) is an approach to improving organizational performance. It evolved mostly within the private sector to maintain a successful business model despite increasing global competition. BPR presents a fundamental improvement in the essential organizational design. This paper investigates recent studies of BPR and identifies the success factors of BPR projects and their connection to the human–technology–organization (HTO) framework. By examining the relevant literature, we study various factors and their effects on the implementation of BPR and how these factors can affect process performance, successfully or otherwise. The aim is to study the literature to determine the success factors and challenges for BPR in the HTO framework. The article concludes by emphasizing the factors that will help to allow BPR to be implemented with a wider use in different sectors.

Seven-waste framework of waste identification and elimination for computer-based administrative work

Purpose

This paper tries to generalize business process improvement (BPI) methodology. It utilizes the seven-waste framework as an essential step in the methodology. While the seven-waste concept is usually applied for manufacturing activities, this paper tries to explore the applicability of it to office-work activities. Also, this paper demonstrates that information technology can be used as a tool for reducing waste in the office-work.

Design/methodology/approach

A comprehensive literature review of BPI methodology studies was conducted in order to propose systematic flowcharts to represent the sequence of processes involved in each step of BPI methodology. The proposed flowcharts are applied to a case study in supply chain planning and allocation planning at a manufacturing company. The seven-waste framework is designed as part of the step, in which equivalency between the definition of waste found on the production floor and waste found in office work is presented.

Findings

The BPI methodology generally follows five steps: initialization, selection, design, implementation and evaluation. The seven-waste framework is effectively applied in the selection step. The case study shows that information technology can be used as a tool in business process improvement to reduce waste in the business process.

Practical implications

The case study indicates that the proposed framework and methodology are proven able to reduce the three key performance indicators. They are the number of steps from 54 to 24 (55% reduction), processing time from 890 min to 313.5 min (64% reduction) and the number of the manual process from 41 to 17 (59% reduction).

Originality/value

This paper proposes a generalization of BPI methodology, the seven-waste framework in the selection step of the BPI methodology, the seven-waste concept in office-work activity and the use of information technology for BPI by reducing waste in office-work activity.