Developing a new approach for evaluation of business processes in a fuzzy environment

Abstract

Evaluation of business processes plays a significant role in business development and improvement. Therefore, organizations need a systematic approach to evaluate all the changes through robust and powerful techniques that can formulate the relationship between the available information and the degree of the inherent uncertainty. In this paper, a set of operational variables are defined. Then, the SPSS software package is utilized to validate the gathered data. After that, the variables are categorized by the use of a clustering technique. Finally, five major factors are determined as the most effective components. According to the inherent uncertainty involved in the process of modelling, fuzzy set theory, a powerful mathematical tool is applied to handle the vagueness. In order to construct a knowledge base based on the fuzzy set theory, the linguistic concepts for each variable are defined. Lastly, membership functions are described and a set of fuzzy rules based on input-output parameters are written in MATLAB software environment. To demonstrate the potential application of the proposed approach, a real case study is illustrated. The results reflect the capability and effectiveness of the approach proposed in this paper.

First published online: 23 Nov 2016

Keyword : fuzzy inference system, assessment of BPM and BPR, bank payment systems, exploratory factor analysis, process improvement