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Utilizing Business Process Management (BPM) for Performance Improvement: A Case Study of an Express
Company in Taiwan

Vola, Alshibani, and Tiscini, 2024; Abbasi, Nishat, Bond, Graham-Knight, Lasserre,
Lucet, and Najjaran, 2024), a common consensus has emerged: by decomposing and
reconstructing business processes, organizations can redefine core activities, differentiate
themselves from competitors, enhance their competitiveness, and improve operational

performance (Scavarda, Ceryno, Azevedo, and Goyannes Gusmão Caiado, 2024;
Szelągowski and Berniak-Woźny, 2024).

2.3 BPM Life Cycle
BPM is dedicated to the continuous improvement of business processes. Thus,
researchers have developed many BPM life cycles to manage this closed-loop initiative.
Nevertheless, various definitions of BPM have led to inconsistent findings on the BPM life
cycle. Hence, a group of researchers analyze several BPM life cycles in 2014 in an attempt

to determine the alignment among the various models (Macedo de Morais, Kazan, Inês
Dallavalle de Pádua, and Lucirton Costa, 2014).
Macedo de Morais et al. (2014) compares six BPM life cycles to the one proposed

in 2009 by the Association of Business Process Management Professionals (ABPMP),
a nonprofit organization that dedicates itself to expanding the body of BPM knowledge.
Macedo de Morais et al. (2014) find that most life cycles emphasize business process
automation. Moreover, using the ABPMP model proposed in 2009 as a reference model,
Macedo de Morais et al. (2014) find all six BPM life cycles are not fundamentally

different, and can be projected in the ABPMP one (see Table 1 below). Each step in the
first row of ABPMP model has a corresponding step in another model. If a step has no
association with the ABPMP model, the cell is blank.

What Macedo de Morais et al. (2014) find support the viewpoint of the Association
of Business Process Management Professionals (2013) that “regardless of the number of
phrases in a BPM life cycle and regardless of the labels used to describe them, the vast
majority can be mapped to the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) Cycle made popular by Dr. W.
Edwards Deming in 1950s” (Association of Business Process Management Professionals,

2013). PDCA cycle details all actions an organization should perform to implement a
BPM project, a cycle which includes understanding the current (AS-IS) business context,
designing the future (TO-BE) business process, implementing the TO-BE business

process, monitoring process performance, and responding to performance results.

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