Inspection Coming Due! How to Determine the Service Interval of Your Processes!

Just like cars, processes require a general inspection from time to time. As, in reality, process portfolio managers are in charge of many processes, they do not have enough resources to deeply inspect all processes simultaneously. Nor would this be reasonable from a process performance point of view. Process portfolio managers therefore require guidance on how to determine the service interval of their processes, i.e., when they should analyze which process in depth to find out whether to initiate redesign projects. Despite the profound knowledge on process improvement, monitoring, and controlling, existing approaches are only able to rank processes or redesign projects. They do not indicate when to conduct an in-depth analysis. To overcome this research gap, we propose the critical process instance method (CPIM) that analytically predicts after which number of executed instances a process should undergo an in-depth analysis. The CPIM combines ideas from process performance management, value-based business process management, and stochastic processes. It accounts for variations in process performance induced by the paths and tasks included in a process model as well as by the positive and negative deviance experienced during past executions. For demonstration purposes, we apply the CPIM to an approval process for loan applications from the banking industry including a scenario analysis.