A closer look at activity relationships to improve business process redesign

Abstract Business process models serve as visual representations of the structured sequence of activities, or activity relationships, aimed at achieving specific organizational objectives. These models explicitly depict only a portion of the activity relationships, leaving other, so-called hidden relationships to be inferred through transitivity and domain knowledge. Because designers lack visibility into these hidden relationships, tasks associated with process redesign (BPR) are more challenging. BPR is a specialized area within business process management focused on modifying process behavior at the model level. While best practices have been introduced, explicit guidance for implementing them is currently lacking. This paper introduces an approach to delineate all possible relationships between any two activities within a BPMN diagram by considering a combination of existential and temporal dependencies. Furthermore, the proposed approach facilitates a detailed specification of change operations related to BPR and their consequential effects on activity relationships. We illustrate this by applying BPR strategies such as resequencing and parallelism to the use case of an order management system.