Design Principles for Using Business Process Management Systems

Organizations aim to achieve operational excellence to reduce costs and improve the quality of their business processes. Business process management (BPM) enables continuous improvement of business processes. Business process management systems (BPMS) serve as an entry point to BPM activities and afford firms to manage, execute, and automate business processes. This study follows an action design research approach to design a BPMS in use together with a medium-sized German fashion company. We concurrently evaluated the artifact-in-use by tracking performance indicators that are aligned with the company’s objective. As a result of our formalization of learning, we propose seven design principles for using BPMSs to achieve continuous improvement of business processes. These design principles comprise user management, process modeling, automation, logging, monitoring, integration, and case handling.