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NTU Management Review Vol. 35 No. 1 Apr. 2025

BPR programs fail. Despite having such high failure rates, there is still a consensus that
companies can still benefit from a BPR program if it is implemented correctly (Alibabaei
et al., 2009).
TQM and BPR both aim to boost corporate performance by improving the business

process. Nevertheless, TQM is considered to be an evolutionary approach that delivers
incremental improvements and requires a corporation to continuously enhance its
processes. Conversely, BPR is intended to provide a radical improvement in short periods

of time by changing the process design, and is more similar to a revolutionary approach
(Serban, 2015; Stoddard and Jarvenpaa, 1995). Moreover, during the application of TQM
or BPR, IT is viewed as a critical enabler of success because automating processes can
provide many benefits if the processes are well-designed (Fiedler, Grover, and Teng, 1995;
Jurisch et al., 2014).

Eventually, researchers and practitioners start to combine TQM, BPR, and IT under
the name of BPM (Hammer, 2010; Bozdogan, 2010; Lee and Asllani, 1997; Roeser and
Kern, 2015). BPM, therefore, includes two sets of tools that share a common goal but

vary in essence. Which tools to use depends on the patterns of performance deficiency. As
Hammer (2010) argues, “pervasive performance shortcomings generally indicate a design
flaw; occasional ones are usually the result of execution difficulties.”

2.2.3 Current Research Status of BPM

BPM has been gaining increased attention both in academia and in practice (Škrinjar
and Trkman, 2013; Moreira and Dallavalle, 2024). The number of published research
articles has been growing yearly, and most of them have been published in the Business

Process Management Journal, followed by conference proceedings (Roeser and Kern,
2015). According to Dumas (2015), recent BPM research trends have been focusing
on interdisciplinary aspects of BPM, and the validation of the BPM life cycle from the
industrial tracks. Moreover, earlier BPM research is mostly conducted in Europe, America,
and Asian countries which are limited to China, Japan, Korea, and India. Therefore, there

is a call for conducting research other than these countries to further contribute to the
development of BPM field (Roeser and Kern, 2015). Furthermore, with the widespread
application of BPM across various areas (Lee, Fredendall, Roth, Sternberg, and Quiroga,

2024) and extensive research into the impact of emerging technologies on BPM (Broccardo,

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