Improving business process performance without increasing cost

This paper proposes a novel approach to improve the performance of a business process without increasing cost. A business process usually consists of multiple tasks connected by their precedence relationships. These tasks are done by some persons who may be normal, sick, or absent. Therefore, the performance of a business process is stochastic in nature, and it can be modeled by the stochastic-flow network theory. In stochastic-flow network, the process performance is the probability that the maximal work flow is no less than the demand d. By this theory, the performance of a business process can be precisely measured under the state of each person. If each person in this process is trained as a all-around person, we can do an optimal person-job reassignment to get the optimal performance. Some examples are demonstrated for explanation of this approach.