BPR Heuristics (Reijers & Liman Mansar catalogue)

The canonical catalogue of business-process-redesign best practices in BPM, compiled by Hajo Reijers and Selma Liman Mansar in their 2005 Omega paper (sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr) and incorporated as Appendix A of Dumas, La Rosa, Mendling & Reijers (2018). The collection consists of ~29 named rules of thumb that consolidate a decade+ of BPR literature (Hammer & Champy, Klein, Peppard & Rowland, Berg & Pottjewijd, Van der Aalst & Van Hee, Buzacott, and others) plus the authors' consulting experience.

Organising framework — seven elements

Each heuristic is indexed by which element of the process-environment it touches:

Customers — contact reduction, integration, touchpoint relocation.
Products — modifying the product to simplify the process.
Business Process Operation (what happens) — order types, task elimination, order-based work, triage, task composition.
Business Process Behaviour (how it is sequenced) — resequencing, parallelism, knock-out, exception handling.
Organization — structure (order assignment, flexible assignment, centralisation, split responsibilities, customer teams, numerical involvement, case manager) and population (extra resources, specialist–generalist, empower, control addition).
Information — buffering, control relocation.
Technology — task automation, integral business-process technology.
External Environment — trust-based alliances, outsourcing, interfacing, contact reduction.

Evaluation against the devil's quadrangle

Every heuristic is tagged with its qualitative impact along the four dimensions of concepts/devils-quadrangle — cost, time, quality, flexibility. Almost every heuristic improves some dimensions while degrading others; naming these trade-offs explicitly is the catalogue's central contribution.

The 29 named heuristics

Extracted from Table 1 of Reijers & Liman Mansar (2005), pp. 285–292. Direction of impact in the table uses ↑/↓ arrows whose interpretation occasionally flips between "value of the dimension" and "improvement of the dimension" — the listing below names the affected dimensions and the typical intended direction, with cited application examples where the paper supplies one.

Customers (3)

Control relocation — move controls to the customer side. Affects: quality, cost. Example: Pacific Bell.
Contact reduction — cut the number of customer contact points. Affects: time, quality, cost. Example: Ford accounts payable (clerks reduced from 500 to 125; contact points 3 → 2).
Integration — integrate with the customer's process (just-in-time, customer carries trays in fast-food). Affects: time, flexibility, cost. Examples: Baxter Healthcare; fast-food self-service.

Products (0)

The paper acknowledges the Products element but catalogues no concrete heuristic — modifying the product to simplify the process is left as a residual category.

Business Process Operation view (5)

Order types — separate flows by order type instead of forcing one path for all. Affects: time, quality, cost, flexibility. Example: IBM Credit (three credit-insurance variants).
Task elimination — remove tasks that add no value. Affects: time, flexibility, cost. Example: high-tech company found semiconductors travelled 150 000 miles during manufacturing.
Order-based work — remove batch processing / periodic activity. Affects: time, cost (own experience).
Triage — split a general task into specialised variants (or merge specialised tasks). Affects: quality, time, cost, flexibility. Limit: too much specialisation can have inverted effects. Example: call-centre triage configurations (Zapf & Heinzl).
Task composition — combine small tasks into a larger one (or decompose oversized tasks). Affects: time, quality, cost, flexibility. Limit: tasks that become too large can have inverted results. Example: electronics company collapsed order-fulfilment into a "customer service representative" role.

Business Process Behaviour view (4)

Resequencing — change task order to remove waste / overlap. Affects: time, cost. Example: Disney automated kiosks.
Parallelism — execute tasks in parallel when dependencies allow. Affects: time, cost, flexibility, quality. Limit: parallel processing only beats sequential when individual job time dominates throughput (Buzacott).
Knock-out — order knock-out tests cheapest/fastest first to fail-fast. Affects: time, cost.
Exception — isolate exceptional cases from the main flow. Affects: time, quality, flexibility.

Organization — structure (7)

Order assignment — assign each case to one resource end-to-end (case ownership). Affects: time, quality, flexibility. Example: Bell Atlantic case teams for digital circuits.
Flexible assignment — keep resource–task assignment flexible (defer assignment as late as possible). Affects: queue time, quality, flexibility.
Centralization — centralise resources for shared use (often enabled by a workflow-management system). Affects: flexibility, time, cost.
Split responsibilities — separate responsibility boundaries cleanly between roles. Affects: time, quality, flexibility.
Customer teams — assign a dedicated team per customer or segment. Affects: cost, time, flexibility, quality. Examples: Hallmark; Microsoft (≤200-person teams).
Numerical involvement — minimise the number of people touching one case. Affects: time, cost, quality. Example: Hammer & Champy's "single insurance claim handler".
Case manager — appoint one person accountable for the case (visible to the customer; may not perform the work). Affects: quality, customer satisfaction, cost. Example: Duke Power Company.

Organization — population (4)

Extra resources — add capacity to a bottleneck. Affects: time, flexibility, cost. Limit: useless if it does not move the bottleneck.
Specialist–generalist — shift roles toward specialists (time) or generalists (flexibility). Affects: time, flexibility.
Empower — give workers decision rights, eliminating sign-off layers. Affects: time, quality, cost. Example: IBM Credit "deal structurer"; Taco Bell eliminated supervisory layers (Market Manager role).
Control addition — add checkpoints where defect cost justifies them. Affects: time, quality, cost.

Information (1)

Buffering — cache / store information so downstream tasks don't re-fetch. Affects: time, cost.

Technology (2)

Task automation — automate individual tasks. Affects: time, quality, flexibility. Examples: Taco Bell taco-making machine; Nissan (rule of thumb: don't automate dirty / difficult / dangerous tasks).
Integral business-process technology — apply IT to the whole process (workflow systems, shared databases, expert systems). Affects: quality, cost, time. Example: Loews Corporation (Telefilm/Teleticket).

External Environment (3)

Trusted party — defer to a trusted third party's judgement (e.g., credit-worthiness check). Affects: cost, time.
Outsourcing — outsource non-core work. Affects: cost, quality. Example: Taco Bell K-Minus (kitchenless restaurant).
Interfacing — standardise interfaces between organisations. Affects: cost, quality, time.

Count: 3 + 5 + 4 + 7 + 4 + 1 + 2 + 3 = 29 named heuristics. The Dumas et al. (2018) Appendix A consolidation lists a similar set with light renaming and a few additions; both descend from this 2005 table.

How to use the catalogue

As a checklist during redesign workshops — review all 29 heuristics against the target process.
To locate trade-offs — the devil's-quadrangle tagging surfaces which redesign lever pulls which dimension.
Within a management philosophy — the authors stress that heuristics must be embedded in an overall vision (Total Cycle Time compression, Lean, Theory of Constraints). They are rules of thumb, not algorithms.

Limitations

Technical only — scope excludes socio-cultural change management.
Qualitative — the four-dimension tags are based on prior literature and consulting experience, not quantified experiments.
Not exhaustive — domain-specific heuristics continue to appear.
Design-time — the catalogue tells you what to do when redesigning a process, not what to do at runtime for a particular case. The prescriptive process monitoring literature later takes up the runtime question.

Agentic-era reinterpretation (2026)

The catalogue has been re-read for the AI-agent era as part of the BPM-evolution arc — see syntheses/ai-agent-redesign-heuristics-2026 for a heuristic-by-heuristic reinterpretation against an agent-era devil's quadrangle, plus 10 new heuristics (B1–B10) the 2005 catalogue could not name (frame-first design, verification-by-judge, tool-mediated action, trajectory observability, adaptation/evolution separation, token-budget, confidence-thresholded knock-out, conversational handoff, frame-respecting outsourcing, determinism-by-request). Pedagogical HTML overview: assets/ai-agent-heuristics-devils-quadrangle.html.

concepts/devils-quadrangle · methods/process-redesign-heuristics · concepts/bpm-lifecycle · concepts/prescriptive-process-monitoring (runtime, data-driven successor intent) · concepts/agentic-bpm · syntheses/redesign-heuristics-vs-prpm · syntheses/ai-agent-redesign-heuristics-2026