What You Can Do to Inhibit Business Process Standardization

Business process standardization (BPS) has recently got into focus of the BPM literature as a methodology to substantially enable efficiency potentials and therefore improve process performance. So far, the BPS literature has exclusively focused on success factors for BPS and relevant capabilities. By contrast, inhibiting factors have not been sufficiently considered, yet, but success factors respectively enablers and inhibitors are not simply the opposites. The objective of this paper is to identify factors which inhibit BPS and to deduce management actions which help successfully standardize processes. To answer this question, we study the case of an international process standardization project in a global maintenance company. We derive a set of inhibiting factors for BPS. Thereby, some of these inhibitors have to be considered for any organizational change project while others are BPS specific. The specific inhibitors are analyzed in detail and discussed by mirroring them to non-BP standardization research.