Brand managers are the champions of balancing innovation and brand strategy that deliver profit, revenue, and cost efficiencies. Review this overview of how businesses as a whole use financial metrics to measure organizational performance. This review of key performance indicators introduces alternatives to evaluate a more holistic view of an organization's performance by considering different performance perspectives.
We conducted a structured literature review (SLR) to find papers dealing with performance measurement in the business process literature. SLR can be defined as "a means of evaluating and interpreting all available research relevant to a particular research question, topic area, or phenomenon of interest". An SLR is a meta study that identifies and summarizes evidence from earlier research or a way to address a potentially large number of identified sources based on a strict protocol used to search and appraise the literature. It is systematic in the sense of a systematic approach to finding relevant papers and a systematic way of classifying the papers. Hence, according to Boellt and Cecez-Kecmanovic, SLR as a specific type of literature review can only be used when two conditions are met. First, the topic should be well-specified and closely formulated (i.e., limited to performance measurement in the context of business processes) to potentially identify all relevant literature based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. Secondly, the research questions should be answered by extracting and aggregating evidence from the identified literature based on a high-level summary or bibliometric-type of content analysis. Furthermore, King and He also refer to a statistical analysis of existing literature.
Informed by the established guidelines proposed by Kitchenham, we undertook the review in distinct stages: (1) formulating the research questions and the search strategy, (2) filtering and extracting data based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, and (3) synthesizing the findings. The remainder of this section describes the details of each stage.
A comprehensive and unbiased search is one of the fundamental factors that distinguish a systematic review from a traditional literature review. For this purpose, a systematic search begins with the identification of keywords and search terms that are derived from the research questions. Based on the research questions stipulated in the introduction, the SLR protocol for our study was defined, as shown in Table 2.
Table 2 The structured literature review protocol for this study, based on Boellt and Cecez-Kecmanovic (2015)
Protocol elements |
Translation to this study |
---|---|
1/Research question |
RQ1. What is the current state of the research on business process performance measurement? RQ2. Which indicators, measures and metrics are used or mentioned in the current literature related to business process performance? |
2/Sources searched |
Web of science database (until November 2015) |
3/Search terms |
Combining "business process*" and "performance indicator*"/"performance metric*"/"performance measur*" |
4/Search strategy |
Different search queries, with keywords in topic and title (Table 3) |
5/Inclusion criteria |
Include only papers containing a combination of search terms, defined in the search queries Include only papers indexed in the Web of Science from all periods until November 2015 Include only papers written in English |
6/Exclusion criteria |
Exclude unrelated papers, i.e., if they do not explicitly claim addressing the measurement of business process performance |
7/Quality criteria |
Only peer-reviewed papers are indexed in the web of science database |
(1) "Performance indicator*" |
(2) "Performance metric*" |
(3) "Performance measur*" |
TOTAL |
|
---|---|---|---|---|
Column keywords in TO |
||||
BP-TO |
153 |
30 |
250 |
433 |
BP-TI |
31 |
4 |
64 |
99 |
Column keywords in TI |
||||
BP-TO |
19 |
2 |
62 |
83 |
BP-TI |
5 |
0 |
14 |
19 |