Patterns for Improving Business Processes: Defined Pattern Categorization

Business process improvement (BPI) is a theme that is widely studied in business process management. It permits the continuous improvement of a process by considering the impact of changes on its performance. One of the most highly cited solutions for BPI is the use of patterns: they allow presenting a set of reusable models aiming to transform the as-is model into an improved model. Our research work is devoted to the act of improvement of business processes. More precisely, we aim to put forward an approach for BPI based on a set of improvement patterns, classified according to their application context. The purpose of this paper is to present our proposed pattern categories by detailing the structure of two types of patterns and demonstrating the way a selected pattern in one of these categories would be applied. The definition of these patterns was primarily based on a pattern meta-model describing the structure of BPI patterns. It was defined in our previous research work where we identified a general meta-model and four specific pattern models applicable to specific contexts. To validate their usefulness, we choose to apply the proposed approach to the process of examining patients in an emergency service.