New Approach to Business Process Management in Construction Companies

Abstract

The challenge that construction companies are faced with at present is the unique character of each executed investment. Each subsequent project is different. The projects differ in terms of the constructed objects, their architecture and functions, client needs, the standard of internal finishes, and rules of cooperation with the investor. Even if the constructed object is following the same blueprint, it is nonetheless different in terms of its immediate surroundings, its neighboring infrastructure, access to the construction site, its organization, and the requirements of the investor or local authorities. On the example of leading Polish construction companies (belonging, in fact, to leading European companies), the article points to the challenges associated with implementing process management in construction companies. The unique character of each investment, their ever-changing conditions, and the concurrent complexity of the executed business processes require the companies to search for new methods of modeling and implementing process management. This requires an approach to process modeling, in which the fundamental goal is no longer the search for or the implementation of a single “ideal process.” The aim of the research was to find principles of practical process design; ones which would enable the adaptation of processes to the requirements of specific contracts in a transparent and workable manner. The article will showcase different attempts at overcoming these challenges, as well as point to the similarities between the prepared solutions, which account for the use of process management in accordance with the concept of dynamic BPM and alongside knowledge management from the onset of the modeling phase. The proposed solution uses the most popular BPMN 2.0 notation standard to model processes, which means that it can be used in standard implementations of process management.