A Review on Flexibility in Business Process and the Role of IT

In the new era of competitiveness and the day-to-day changing environment; firms try to acquirecompetitive advantages to enhance their business and excel their market. Business process improvement(BPI) plays an important role to be successful in this edge. To be agile enough to benefit from thesetransformation while improving the performance and productivity and adaptive enough to the changingsituation, firms must take advantage of BP flexibility. Enterprises need to achieve flexible corecompetencies to survive in revolutionized atmosphere and surpass competitors. Inflexible systems arelikely to bound companies into rigid BP. Many organizations fail to conform to this situation and wereunsuccessful to reach their goals effectively. Lack of flexible BP undergoes difficulties to strategicrestructuring. With the help of flexible IT Tools and appropriate IT implementation successful BPI will beprovided. The importance of the concept causes many researchers to discover variables which haveimpact on the BP flexibility. This paper will concentrate on the definition and essence on the flexibility;categorize the literature flexibility into three major aspects; Operational, Strategic and Tactical, andspecifically discuss about how flexible IT can help to improve BP and also the factors which affect thesemajor dimensions of flexibility and finally put forth recommendations how these factors could beorganized to achieve competitive edge by in building flexibility into BP so it can adapt and respond toenvironmental uncertainty