A Framework for Assessing BPM Success

Business Process Management is intensively used by organizations with varying objectives. Most adopt this approach in order to achieve continuous process improvement, such as better performance and conformance of their processes. Many studies have been done on BPM methodologies that companies follow in practice when adopting BPM, which resulted in the identification of various success factors. However, these prior works hardly consider the variety of configurations in terms of diverging objectives and actions how companies approach BPM. In this paper, we emphasize this point by addressing the challenge of developing a theoretical framework in which individual cases of success and failure can be studied. We propose a BPM implementation framework which comprises ten elements that are interlinked with each other. We conducted in-depth interviews with two companies and used the BPM implementation framework to assess the success of both BPM initiatives. We were able to reach conclusions such as that for particular goals a company has there is a minimum set of BPM-related actions this company has to conduct in order to come to the desired outcome.