Abstract—The topic of business process improvement or reengineering has a long history in business literature both on the academic side and among managers, there is a lot of confusion and debate on this topic and it has not lost its popularity. The concept of reorganizing dysfunctional business processes still exists even in the twenty-first century–usually with new and more sophisticated tools and methodologies, but based on old principals. The narrowing markets, increasing competition and the recent economic crisis all stimulate companies towards continuous rationalization, cost reduction and increased efficiency to gain some kind of comparative advantage which creates a basis for the development of methodologies for process improvement. In this paper we would like to collect and systemize these process improvement tools and methods from a historical as well as from a functional point of view, researching the most important and influential academic journals. We also examine some major trends associated with this evolution process, which divert developers of these tools towards a combination of both specialization and generalization. As the production-focused approach of process improvement is inherently becoming attractive for service organizations, we also examine the service orientation of these methods and tools.

Index Terms—improvement, process, reengineering, services

Cite: Ákos Gubán and Richard Kása, "A Literature Based Review of Business Process Amelioration Methods and Techniques Regarding Service Orientation," Journal of Advanced  Management Science, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 230-235, June 2013. doi: 10.12720/joams.1.2.230-235