Reengineering a business process with an innovative workflow management system

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has been proposed as a new approach to facing the challenge of improving the quality of a business process while reducing its costs. Workgroup computing systems can be considered as the best candidates for BPR, since they aim to improve the effectiveness of the group of people collaborating within a work process. In particular workflow management systems seem to offer the best support to a reengineered business process. In this paper we report on a case of BPR. It consists in the application to a real bank procedure of both a new approach to the analysis of work processes (allowing the evaluation of its transaction costs) and a prototype of a Workflow Management System (WMS), allowing an effective handling of procedure breakdowns without forcing the designers to take care of them.