Modelling and measuring milestones in business process optimization

The article develops a method to model and also measure the level in which a business has progressed towards business process optimization (BPO). In cases where tougher competition in business leads to opportunity losses, top managements in organizations tend to blame the operations managers for failure to optimize their processes. The extent to which progress towards ideal optimization has been attained is not noted, which is failure to acknowledge the efforts made or even the milestones already reached towards optimal level. In making it easy to measure the extent to ideal state of optimization, BPO is unpacked into its basic units. Then linear programing and probability measures are applied to enable measuring the level at which efforts already completed are away from the ideal state of BPO. The basic units enable a way to identify stages already completed and those that still remain to reach the BPO. This helps to explain to management that while ideal BPO has not been reached, some successes towards BPO have been attained. Such successes are identified by the completed stages, the level of success is also given as a measure, and incomplete parts are also identifiable.