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

2.4 BPM Applications
BPM has been applied to both the private and public sectors since its inception
(Hammer and Champy, 1993; Khosravi, 2016; Brocke and Rosemann, 2015). Many
organizations successfully improve their performance by adopting BPM to manage

their business processes (Ranganathan and Dhaliwal, 2001; Trkman, 2010) and to align
organizational strategies with business processes (Ensslin, Enssolin, Dutra, Nunes, and
Reis, 2017). Based on the previous research, Pradabwong, Braziotis, Tannock, and Pawar

(2017) further conduct a quantitative study to examine the relationship between BPM and
organizational performance. More recently, scholars have further applied BPM to the area
of sustainability (Sohns, Aysolmaz, Figge, and Joshi, 2023; Mc Loughlin, Lewis, Lascelles,
and Nudurupati, 2023), creativity management (Narzullayeva and Bakayeva, 2022),
and AI (Rosemann, Brocke, Van Looy, and Santoro, 2024). These studies demonstrate a

positive and significant relationship, and note that BPM can result in better supply-chain
collaborations. In other words, BPM not only benefits a firm’s internal performance but
also improves a firm’s external relationship with suppliers and customers.

Moreover, to obtain an in-depth insight into the types of BPM projects that
organizations adopted, a team of researchers and practitioners investigates BPM (Reijers,
van Wijk, Mutschler, and Leurs, 2010) and analyzes a set of 33 completed industrial
BPM projects. They find that only 3 out of the 33 BPM projects focus on improving the
support process; one of these three projects reveals that a financial service provider aims

to improve its client information management process to assist sales in maintaining its
relationship with clients. Unfortunately, the investigation does not disclose more details
about the other two projects due to confidentiality restraints.

Nonetheless, what Reijers et al. (2010) find are consistent with Ranganathan and
Dhaliwal (2001), who conduct a survey which find that organizations do not plan to
manage their support process over the subsequent 5 years, regardless of the level of
interest in it. This finding again is consistent with prior studies that BPM is mainly applied
to primary processes of organizations (Gosnik, Pofuk, and Kavcic, 2015; Khosravi, 2016).

Nevertheless, as mentioned in Section 1, support processes such as HRM processes are
critical for maintaining daily operations of express companies. They are as important
as primary processes and yet are relatively ignored. Thus, this paper focuses on the

application of the BPM life cycle to support processes and aims to fill a notable gap in

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