Basic Considerations on Business Process Quality

Abstract. Quality management practices in manufacturing and logis-tics have led to proven results for organisations with respect to com-petitiveness and profitability. At the same time, business process man-agement not only addresses a comprehensive functional scope including the ever more important administrative functions and business services, but also contributes to realising potentials (e.g. in the field of process automation) through extensive use of information technology. Integrat-ing quality management with business process management concepts is thus very promising from a business perspective. The evolution of a clear understanding of business process quality constitutes a fundamental pre-requisite for progress in this field as only a concise definition will point out the issues that need to be addressed in more detailed research. This paper aims at discussing basic considerations in this respect. We look into requirements to be posed towards a definition of business process quality, discuss various basic quality views and their fit with business process management, provide a fundamental if not yet practically ap-plicable business process quality definition, and examine related aspects of business processes as well as related work. While this approach will not lead to a final applicable definition of business process quality, its contribution will lie in entering into a more systematic discussion to en-compass the wide array of existing results that can be correlated with business process quality and giving directions for future research.