Business process management (BPM)

In today’s functionally oriented organisations, different departments operate to their own separate tune, leading to confused communication lines, badly defined processes, and massive variations in the way things get done. This results in lots of hidden costs and confusion for the customer. Therefore, companies are becoming increasingly focused on cross-departmental, end-to-end business processes.

Business Process Management (BPM) delivers the crucial business glue that synchronises the management, operation, monitoring and improvement of the capabilities of the enterprise. BPM is unique in its ability to tame the relentless competitive, service and cost pressures in all organisations, and it enables enterprises to adapt faster and faster while enhancing quality and reducing costs.

Key research areas

We have special expertise in:

  • Vlerick "Business Process Orientation" (BPO) Assessment Tool
  • Business Process Improvement and Innovation: Going from an as-is situation to an improved to-be process requires a well structured approach for creative process analysis and improvement.
  • The people side of BPM: adopting a process-oriented way of working asks for carefully planned guidance of the change process. Employees will be expected to act and think differently.
  • Organising for Business Process Management: In some cases new roles and responsibilities come with Business Process Management. Some organisations choose to install a centre of excellence to govern process standardisation and improvement initiatives.

Interested in research in any of these domains? Contact us at joachim.vandenbergh@vlerick.com.

Research results and publications

Curious about some of our research results and publications?

  • The relation between Organisational Change and BPO

    The higher the BPO score of a company the more employees experience and thus perceive change in their daily job. It requires more than a minimum of change efforts in an organisation in order to become gradually more process oriented.

  • A holistic view on BPM

    The paper “The process-oriented organisation: a holistic view. Developing a framework for business process orientation maturity” was submitted and accepted at the 5th International BPM Conference, Brisbane, September 24-27. Joachim Van den Bergh, BPMNetwork researcher will present the paper at the conference in September 2007.

  • The role of a Business Process Office

    Jurgen Willems presented the paper “Setting-up a Business Process-Support Organization: The Role of a Business Process office” at the International Resources Management Association (IRMA) Conference 2007 held in Vancouver (Canada), May 19-23.

Research for your organisation

In addition to conducting research that contributes to fundamental academic knowledge, we can also carry out practice-based research especially for your organisation.

Our experts

Meet the faculty and researchers who are experts in Business process management.

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