---
title: BPR Heuristics (Reijers & Liman Mansar catalogue)
type: concept
tags: [bpr, redesign, heuristics, devils-quadrangle]
sources: ["[[sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr]]", "[[sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm]]"]
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-05-11
---

# 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 [[sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm|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:

1. **Customers** — contact reduction, integration, touchpoint relocation.
2. **Products** — modifying the product to simplify the process.
3. **Business Process Operation** (what happens) — order types, task elimination, order-based work, triage, task composition.
4. **Business Process Behaviour** (how it is sequenced) — resequencing, parallelism, knock-out, exception handling.
5. **Organization** — *structure* (order assignment, flexible assignment, centralisation, split responsibilities, customer teams, numerical involvement, case manager) and *population* (extra resources, specialist–generalist, empower, control addition).
6. **Information** — buffering, control relocation.
7. **Technology** — task automation, integral business-process technology.
8. **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 [[sources/2005-reijers-limanmansar-best-practices-bpr|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)
1. **Control relocation** — move controls to the customer side. *Affects:* quality, cost. *Example:* Pacific Bell.
2. **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).
3. **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)
4. **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).
5. **Task elimination** — remove tasks that add no value. *Affects:* time, flexibility, cost. *Example:* high-tech company found semiconductors travelled 150 000 miles during manufacturing.
6. **Order-based work** — remove batch processing / periodic activity. *Affects:* time, cost (own experience).
7. **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).
8. **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)
9. **Resequencing** — change task order to remove waste / overlap. *Affects:* time, cost. *Example:* Disney automated kiosks.
10. **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).
11. **Knock-out** — order knock-out tests cheapest/fastest first to fail-fast. *Affects:* time, cost.
12. **Exception** — isolate exceptional cases from the main flow. *Affects:* time, quality, flexibility.

### Organization — structure (7)
13. **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.
14. **Flexible assignment** — keep resource–task assignment flexible (defer assignment as late as possible). *Affects:* queue time, quality, flexibility.
15. **Centralization** — centralise resources for shared use (often enabled by a workflow-management system). *Affects:* flexibility, time, cost.
16. **Split responsibilities** — separate responsibility boundaries cleanly between roles. *Affects:* time, quality, flexibility.
17. **Customer teams** — assign a dedicated team per customer or segment. *Affects:* cost, time, flexibility, quality. *Examples:* Hallmark; Microsoft (≤200-person teams).
18. **Numerical involvement** — minimise the number of people touching one case. *Affects:* time, cost, quality. *Example:* Hammer & Champy's "single insurance claim handler".
19. **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)
20. **Extra resources** — add capacity to a bottleneck. *Affects:* time, flexibility, cost. *Limit:* useless if it does not move the bottleneck.
21. **Specialist–generalist** — shift roles toward specialists (time) or generalists (flexibility). *Affects:* time, flexibility.
22. **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).
23. **Control addition** — add checkpoints where defect cost justifies them. *Affects:* time, quality, cost.

### Information (1)
24. **Buffering** — cache / store information so downstream tasks don't re-fetch. *Affects:* time, cost.

### Technology (2)
25. **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).
26. **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)
27. **Trusted party** — defer to a trusted third party's judgement (e.g., credit-worthiness check). *Affects:* cost, time.
28. **Outsourcing** — outsource non-core work. *Affects:* cost, quality. *Example:* Taco Bell K-Minus (kitchenless restaurant).
29. **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

1. **As a checklist** during redesign workshops — review all 29 heuristics against the target process.
2. **To locate trade-offs** — the devil's-quadrangle tagging surfaces which redesign lever pulls which dimension.
3. **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 [[concepts/prescriptive-process-monitoring|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]].

## Related

[[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]]