The Power of Process
in
Business Optimization

The Power of Process in Business Optimization

According to Dr. Stefanie Rinderle-Ma, process orientation can be a game changer in optimizing organizations. Stefanie is a well-known BPM researcher. She is chair of Information Systems and Business Process Management at the Technical University of Munich and vice-chair of the BPM Conference Steering Committee. She is especially well known for her work on flexible process management, work on which she also won the BPM Test of Time award. She does much of her research in collaboration with manufacturing companies, where efficiency and process optimization always play an important role.

Process Orientation: Shifting from Disjoint Perspectives to a Holistic View

"Process orientation helps a lot, because it can bring many different perspectives together," Stefanie says. "As an example, production processes typically have two phases: one where they produce and one where they check the quality of what they produced. They also collect a lot of data, but in a bit of a disconnected way.” She continues: “This disconnect is problematic, because if you encounter a problem with product quality, you want to trace that back to what happened during production.” According to Stefanie, process orientation presents a concrete opportunity for enabling the integration of different data sources in production: “Process event data can be used as a linking pin between the different sets of sensor data that are produced by different machines. In the end this can help, for example, to detect where in the production process a quality problem came from.”

Stefanie and her team have achieved practical results by taking this integrated process perspective. “For example, we have a cooperation with a company that manufactures physical security solutions. For them we were able to measure and subsequently achieve energy consumption optimizations for their production by taking the process perspective. They won the Green IT Award for this.”

Integrating the Task Perspective and the Process Perspective

The field of process optimization is dominated by people from the Operations Research (OR) community and their counterparts in industry, such as production and supply chain managers. Stefanie has a strong collaboration with them, for example through the ‘Advanced Optimization in a Networked Economy (AdONE)’ project. 

Traditionally OR researchers and practitioners focus on optimizing individual tasks, but Stefanie sees an increasing interest in process orientation among them. “Especially Process Mining is a very hot topic,” Stefanie says. “We can for example use it to provide insight into uncertainty: what exceptions can happen in production and supply. We can even use it to predict whether exceptions will happen.” This kind of insights can be used to optimize processes for exceptional situations. This kind of synergy, where BPM provides process insights and OR uses them to improve processes, is extremely promising. "However, process mining is not an end in itself," Stefanie states. "It is a lever to unlock the true potential of our processes. The question is, how do we leverage these insights for real-world improvements in efficiency, productivity, and overall business performance?" This is the question that process optimization aims to answer in the end.

According to Stefanie, we can also merge existing optimization methods with the process perspective to get the best of both worlds: “What is already being done is that we take existing optimization methods and apply them in business process management. Resource allocation is one example where we already do this.” Moving forward, Stefanie sees strong potential for integration that goes beyond simply applying methods from area to another. “In work that we published last year, we showed that an integration of an existing optimization method with process mining can be used to solve a variant of the job shop scheduling problem more efficiently.”

Process Execution Systems Closing the Loop

Business process management aims to support ‘full cycle’ business process optimization by supporting process discovery and mining, analysis, improvement, and implementation. "To truly close the loop, organizations need robust process execution systems," Stefanie emphasizes. "It is about translating insights into action and ensuring that the improvements identified are not confined to paper but actively implemented in day-to-day operations." 

The Future is: Everything Integrated

Process management is key when connecting different steps in production processes from both data and optimization perspectives. At the same time the cycle of process management can also be better integrated by integrating process discovery and mining with optimization and execution. Stefanie: “This isn't just about efficiency; it's about creating adaptive, responsive, and optimized business ecosystems."