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Introduction
Organizations are continually searching for innovative ways to enhance competitiveness. In recent years, techniques directed toward improving business processes have received much attention (Nave, 2002). Hammer (2004) argued that "operations can often be the foundation of strategy and the basis for superior performance." Improving processes with the goal of enhancing the firm's competitive position requires an analysis of both construction and performance processes and also a critical assessment of how individual processes contribute to the firm's business model and strategy. At the highest level, a firm's business model is one large process, made up of thousands of smaller interrelated processes. Magretta (2002) described a firm's strategy as "focusing on defining the competencies that will enable the implementation of that model."
Most process improvement initiatives have focused on operations as opposed to marketing or finance. Historically, operations management has been associated with manufacturing and manufacturing support activities. In the past two decades, process management was established within the operational function of organizations under different names. Beginning in the mid 1980s, most process management attention focused on applying controls in the manufacturing areas. The operational implementation was seen in quality improvement, notably Deming's approach (Deming, 1986), Motorola's six sigma approach (Mikel and Schroeder, 2000), various versions of total quality management (Oakland, 1989), just-in-time manufacturing (Harrison, 1992) and lean thinking (Womack and Jones, 1996). More recently, the term "operations" has evolved to denote all activities involved in bringing products and services to customers, and businesses have been applying the techniques of operations management to the entire spectrum of business operations. Enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and supply chain management (SCM) all provide an opportunity to enhance existing processes and serve as a catalyst for operational innovation.
In the 1990s, much of the attention in the process arena was focused on business process re-engineering (BPR), an approach introduced by Hammer (1990). The potential benefits cited for BPR included increased productivity through reduced process time and costs, improved quality, and greater customer satisfaction. Despite significant investments of time and resources, however, many BPR projects failed to achieve desired results (Holland and Kumar, 1995; AlMashari and Zairi, 1999). Valiris and Glykas (1999) found that many methodologies "concentrated on organizational processes without paying attention to the roles and...