---
title: "Best practices in business process redesign: an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics"
type: source
tags: [bpr, redesign, heuristics, devils-quadrangle, foundational]
authors: [Reijers, Hajo A.; Liman Mansar, Selma]
year: 2005
venue: "Omega 33(4): 283–306 (Elsevier)"
kind: paper
raw_path: "raw/Predictive process monitoring/Best practices in business process redesign (2005).pdf"
doi: "10.1016/j.omega.2004.04.012"
created: 2026-04-20
updated: 2026-04-20
key_claims:
  - Business process redesign comprises two distinct challenges — technical (designing a better process) and socio-cultural (managing change) — and this paper addresses only the technical challenge.
  - A product-and-process framework with seven elements (customers, products, business process operation, business process behaviour, organization [structure + population], information, technology, external environment) structures where redesign heuristics apply.
  - 29 catalogued BPR best-practice heuristics are each evaluated qualitatively along four dimensions — cost, time, quality, flexibility — the Brand & van der Kolk (1995) "devil's quadrangle".
  - Heuristics are rules of thumb, not algorithms; they almost always improve some dimensions while degrading others, and must be embedded in an overarching management philosophy (Total Cycle Time compression, Lean, Theory of Constraints) to be effective.
  - The catalogue draws from a wide literature survey (Hammer & Champy, Klein, Peppard & Rowland, Berg & Pottjewijd, Van der Aalst & Van Hee, Buzacott, and others) plus the authors' own case experience.
---

# Reijers & Liman Mansar 2005 — Best Practices in Business Process Redesign

Foundational BPR heuristics catalogue. Published in *Omega* (2005) 33:283–306. Written while Reijers was at TU Eindhoven and Liman Mansar at London Metropolitan University.

## What the paper does

The authors consolidate the then-scattered BPR literature into a **named, structured catalogue of ~29 redesign heuristics** ("best practices") and evaluate each one qualitatively against the **devil's quadrangle** — the four-way trade-off among cost, flexibility, time and quality proposed by Brand & van der Kolk (1995). They explicitly restrict scope to the **technical challenge** of redesign (the mechanics of the process), leaving socio-cultural change management outside the paper.

## The framework (§2)

Seven process elements serve as the indexing scheme for the catalogue:

1. **Customers** — relocation of contact points, reducing/integrating customer touchpoints.
2. **Products** — modifying the product to simplify the process.
3. **Business Process Operation view** — what activities happen: order types, task elimination, order-based work, triage, task composition.
4. **Business Process Behaviour view** — how activities are sequenced: resequencing, parallelism, knock-out, exception handling.
5. **Organization** — structure (order assignment, flexible assignment, centralization, 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, outsourcing, interfacing, contact reduction.

## Heuristic evaluation (§4, Table 1)

Each heuristic is presented with: general formulation, potential effects (expressed as `time` / `cost` / `quality` / `flexibility` impact, possibly with sign), possible drawbacks and limits, citations to prior literature where it was proposed, the analytical technique used (guideline / queuing model / simulation / conditions), tool availability, and documented application examples (IBM Credit, Ford accounts payable, Hallmark, Bell Atlantic, Taco Bell, Disney, and others).

The authors emphasise that the list is not exhaustive and that heuristics are **not universally beneficial**: triage can over-specialise; task composition can create oversized tasks; parallelism is only preferred when individual job time dominates over throughput.

## Why this page matters

The Reijers–Liman Mansar catalogue is **the** canonical reference for BPR heuristics in BPM. It is condensed in Appendix A of Dumas et al. *Fundamentals of BPM* (2018) and grounds the Heuristic Process Redesign method. It is also the starting point against which later **prescriptive process monitoring** methods should be compared: PrPM proposes runtime, data-driven *recommendations* for how to redesign an ongoing case, whereas Reijers–Liman Mansar is design-time, expert-driven. Both share the devil's quadrangle as evaluation scaffolding.

## Connections

**Concepts:** [[concepts/devils-quadrangle]] · [[concepts/bpr-heuristics]] · [[concepts/bpm-lifecycle]] · [[concepts/business-process]]

**Methods:** [[methods/process-redesign-heuristics]]

**Entities:** [[entities/hajo-reijers]] · [[entities/selma-liman-mansar]]

**Related sources:** [[sources/2018-dumas-fundamentals-of-bpm]] (Appendix A consolidates this catalogue) · [[sources/2014-groger-prescriptive-analytics-bpo]] (runtime, data-driven successor intent) · [[sources/2022-kubrak-prescriptive-ppm-slr]] (PrPM SLR — the catalogue's modern counterpart at runtime).