Factors Influencing Business Process Standardization: A Multiple Case Study

Organizations make determined efforts to standardize their business processes in order to gain performance improvements. Having integrated and standardized data as well as processes reduces costs, improves collaboration and eases decision making for managers. Higher quality levels can be reached by successfully implemented standard processes. But due to the wide variety of business process types several challenges for the standardization of business processes exist. The diversity of business processes makes business process management (BPM) a cumbersome and complex challenge. Therefore, the main aim of this paper is to identify business process standardization success factors. As a first step, we use the categorization criteria offered by Lillrank as a starting point for our research and develop a theoretical research model of business process standardization success. Afterwards we conduct a preliminary test of our model in two case studies at two German companies.