Business process flexibility: Evaluation criteria and guidelines

The business environment of most enterprises comprises of fluid requirements, and emergent behaviour that cause continuous changes across the enterprises' business processes. Thus, Process Management Systems (PMSs) able to handle such changes become a necessity for businesses in order to effectively respond in this volatile environment. However, despite the plethora of available PMS, dynamic process change is hardly being addressed in most of them. Therefore, the task of selecting a PMS that supports flexible business processes effectively and in this way face the volatile nature of the business environment is not easy. This task is being addressed in this paper by proposing a set of evaluation criteria for flexible PMS. In addition, a business case scenario from the banking sector and selection guidelines have been employed, in order to demonstrate how the proposed criteria framework may be applied practically during the selection of the `best-fit' PMS.