Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to present and discuss results from the first empirical study on the status and the success factors of Six Sigma in the financial services sector. Design/methodology/approach – An empirical study using a comprehensive and tested survey instrument has...

Purpose The business engineering (BE) methodology is used to design process-oriented and customer-centred companies in a systematic and holistic way. However, BE demands a high learning effort with regard to the logical flow, instruments and supporting software. The purpose of this paper is to...

Purpose: Insights about customers' processes of value creation are highly beneficial for companies striving to provide customers with added value in their processes. Customer processes (CPs) of a complex nature, like buying real estate, are highly heterogenous and comprise numerous activities....

Purpose: Companies that strive to provide customers with value in their processes benefit from artefacts that allow them to better understand customer processes (CPs) and to influence CPs in ways that are valuable for customers. Such CP-centric artefacts (CPCAs) carry various labels across...

Purpose: This study investigates the impact of the degree of process maturity on the degree of patient orientation in the context of radical process changes. The study is based on a sample of healthcare providers in Ukraine which experiences a fundamental transformation of its healthcare...

Purpose – Lean thinking is important for a successful implementation of process-driven changes. Especially financial service providers are forced to improve their organisational efficiency due to intense competition and regulatory burdens. The purpose of this paper is to identify how lean...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to understand the role of increasing employees’ level of continuous improvement (CI) empowerment, i.e. employees’ knowledge and understanding of CI, the possibility of open communication and support from the work environment regarding CI, in the...

Crucial bank inefficiencies are rooted in the bank's production processes. From an operations perspective, the assessment of inefficiencies, especially in highly standardised processes, should lead to better directed action for improvement and hence efficiency enhancement. This paper presents a...

Purpose – A major problem of operational control in the services industry is the integration of customers in the delivery process. The aim of this paper is to develop a method that allows service companies to evaluate the impact of customer integration on operational control in service...