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

Association of Business Process Management Professionals (2013) claims that
different labels caused confusion among practitioners and researchers and led to
inconsistent research findings. Conversely, the Deming Cycle (i.e. the PDCA cycle) is
straightforward, renowned, and less biased. Therefore, the PDCA cycle should be used

to explain and deploy BPM programs (Association of Business Process Management
Professionals, 2013). Many researchers and practitioners support ABPMP’s statement and
do not develop other new life cycles further. (Lee and Dale 1998; Makhlouf and Allal-

Cherif, 2015; Munehira, 2014; Wangen and Snekkenes, 2014).
More recently, another group of researchers incorporates the ABPMP model
proposed in 2009 with external factors outside the organization and proposes a framework
to manage the external environment when implementing BPM (Bernardo, Galina, and
de Pádua, 2017). This framework specifically focuses on considering external resources

before implementing BPM projects.
Nevertheless, current studies of the BPM life cycle focus on providing a
comprehensive view but fail to deal with the high-risk during implementation (Khosravi,

2016). As mentioned in subsection 2.2.2., 70% of BPR projects have failed to reach
predetermined goals (Champy, 1995). Khosravi (2016) posits that the high failure rate
could be attributed to a lack of commitment from senior management, a lack of clear
objectives, and employee resistance. However, the root problem may lie in the design of
such methods. Therefore, Khosravi (2016) proposes a new model in attempting to bridge

this gap, and names the business process rearrangement and renaming model (BPR2).
BPR2 embraces the power of name as a technique to eliminate employee resistance in
its cycle steps. However, the model only focuses on the implementation of BPR to the

detriment of the other half of BPM—the incremental methods descend from TQM. Thus,
we should view BPR2 as a complementary model for supporting current BPM life cycles,
not a substitute.
Although several distinct BPM life cycles have been proposed recently, the models
either focus on BPR and ignore the other half of BPM (Khosravi, 2016) or still build on

previous frameworks (Macedo de Morais et al., 2014) that had already been included in
the PDCA cycle (Association of Business Process Management Professionals, 2013).
Therefore, this study selects the ABPMP’s PDCA cycle as the reference model for its

comprehensiveness and simplicity.

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