The challenge to determine a company’s process maturity: a case study from the financial services industry

Purpose. Conducting projects to improve a company’s business processes is of utmost importance in all industries and countries. Many companies have installed specific organizational units to develop guidelines for process design, to document and maintain of these processes, and to further increase the processes’ efficiency. Although these enterprises continually work on improving their processes, they often struggle to answer the question on the current status of the maturity of their processes. Therefore, the purpose of this work is to characterize the methodology, applicability, pitfalls and benefits of analyzing the maturity of processes. Design/Method/Approach. This work is based on mixed-methods research recently conducted in a medium-sized German bank. Findings. The paper defined the benefits of measuring the level of maturity of the company’s processes clearly. This work identified the substantial theoretical drawbacks, such as, for example, the lack of considering of process innovation in the extant models of process maturity. Limitations. Naturally, a research limitation is the analysis of a specific company in the financial services sector. Theoretical implications. From a theoretical point of view it is critical to choose the appropriate model out of a variety of available process maturity models. In fact, the selection of the model influences the data, the subsequent interpretation of these data, and the conclusions to be drawn for the company. Originality/Value. The paper is novel as it presents–based on empirical data–the measurement of process maturity including the derivation of implications from both an academic and a practical perspective. In addition, the impact of process maturity on perceived process performance could be shown.  Paper type – empirical.