Teaching Process Redesign with a Competition
摘要
Business process redesign is an important part of Business Process Management. However, evaluating the impact of a process redesign in an educational setting poses challenges, because students do not get direct feedback on whether the redesigned process is better. Feedback received from the lecturers on that feels less realistic to them. To address this issue, we developed an assignment that enhances the learning experience by facilitating students in analyzing and redesigning a business process and immediately seeing the effect of their redesign on performance indicators. This paper presents the design and implementation of the assignment. The assignment focuses on the redesign of a business process with respect to operational decisions made in the process. It is presented to the students in the form of a competition to motivate them further. This year, the assignment focused on improving the treatment process of a fictitious hospital by optimizing decisions on patient admission and resource allocation. However, the assignment is developed in a general framework, which facilitates the development of new or modified assignments on a yearly basis. This year, the assignment has been used in courses at two different universities and is planned for further use at three other universities. The assignments that the students handed in showed good understanding by the students and showed that they made a real effort to solve the assignment well. Informal feedback from the students was also positive.