A study of transaction patterns in business processes aiming to reduce declines of orders: A case study of a service company in Japan

This study proposes eight transaction patterns aiming to reduce exceptions causing the executor's "decline" of the initiator's "request" (order). In business organizations, quite a few of these exceptions occur, and quite a lot of time and energy are wasted in coping with such exceptions. Sometimes, the exceptions may also cause a decrease in customer satisfaction due to the deference of the clerks who cope with them. Nonetheless, there seem to have been few useful solution patterns suggested by those working on business process modeling to avoid such exceptions. Hence in this paper, we make an attempt to create transaction patterns to reduce the number of such exceptions. Specifically, eight transaction pattens for avoiding the "decline" of the executor against the "request" (order) of the initiator are theoretically derived from the viewpoint of the relationship between actors who join a transaction, which depends upon the "language action perspective." Moreover, these eight transaction patterns derived are practically verified through application to a certain service company in Japan. The results show that these eight transaction patterns derived are verified by the existence of all eight patterns in the company. Therefore, this also suggests that the "language action perspective" can be used as a solution to solve the defect of business process flexibility, which is too complicated to understand when described in the context of comprehensive business processes in an enterprise.