Improving the effectiveness of business process development through collaboration engineering: a method for process elicitation Kalle Piirainen, Kalle Elfvengren, Jukka Korpela, Markku Tuominen Lappeenranta University of Technology Department of Industrial Management P.O. Box 20 FIN-53851 Lappeenranta Finland {kalle.piirainen|kalle.elfvengren|jukka.korpela|markku.tuominen}@lut.fi Abstract Businesses transform and processes are transformed as organizations adapt to a changing business environment. The discipline of business process reengineering has proposed guidelines for this transformation, but the task is still challenging and the risk of failure remains high. Especially group work presents major challenges for process design.. Accordingly, this paper proposes a group support system to support process development. The paper leverages the collaboration engineering framework in designing an artifact to support teamwork in process elicitation. The artifact has been designed at a conceptual level and validated through a business case in a global process industry organization. The case indicates that the method for process elicitation works as intended in the given context. The contribution is a group process for business process development. 1. Introduction Business processes transform and are transformed as organizations adapt to changing situations. Traditional manufacturing companies have been forced to move with the changing environment, which has resulted in a need of tools for business process development. Process management is a natural choice for a management framework for many manufacturing companies, as organizations are accustomed to viewing their actions as processes from manufacturing to management. The general idea is to make management interventions repeatable, but what happens if the system breaks down and the processes do not behave in the intended manner? The apparent answer is process development, more commonly called business process reengineering. Business process reengineering (BPR) has been a popular tool for the management for some years. The mission of BPR discipline is to offer tools for business development through identification and transform of workflows and processes. BPR consists of radically transforming organizational processes through the optimal use of information technologies to achieve major improvements in quality, performance, and productivity [10] [17]. The literature on the subject is broad, including general discussion, practical advice, and frameworks. Some reviews have not been very favorable, e.g. [24], and many projects have not been successful for various reasons, including lacking planning and execution of BPR activities. The real-world problem specific to this paper is that a manufacturing company has experienced problems in a business process despite some efforts of improving the process. The company is facing challenges with the demand forecasting process. Forecasting accuracy is in a constant focus for improvement and the tools used for supporting the process are being developed to satisfy the user needs more comprehensively. The requirements for the quality of the outcome of the forecasting process are high, as the outcome is used as input to other business-critical processes, like capacity management. What makes the situation peculiar, is that the process performance remains sub-par even though some effort has been put into improving demand forecasting. Thus, the first step before making further attempts to improve the process is to gather data about the demands, experiences and problems from the stakeholders in the process. The case is the demand forecasting process of a process industry company. The main research problem in this paper is to develop a method to engage various stakeholders in a process development or process engineering workshop. The literature review conducted to form the artifact revealed that the existing literature leaves room for Proceedings of the 42nd Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences - 2009 1 978-0-7695-3450-3/09 $25.00 © 2009 IEEE