Ilahi, LatifaGhannouchi, Sonia AyachiMartinho, Ricardo2025-09-112025-09-112017-09-14Ilahi, Latifa & Ghannouchi, Sonia & Martinho, Ricardo. (2017). BPFlexTemplate: A Business Process template generation tool based on similarity and flexibility. IJISPM - International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management. 5. 67-89. 10.12821/ijispm0503042182-7788http://hdl.handle.net/10400.8/14045In large organizations with multiple organizational units, process variants emerge due to many aspects, including local management policies, resources or socio-technical limitations. Organizations then struggle to improve a business process which has no longer a single process model to redesign, implement and adjust. In this paper, we propose an approach to tackle these two challenges: decrease the proliferation of process variants in these organizations, and foresee, at the same time, the need of having flexible business processes that allow for a certain degree of adjustment. To validate our approach, we first conducted case studies where we collected six real-world business process variants from two organizational units of the same healthcare organization. We then proposed an algorithm to derive a template process model from all the variants, which includes common and flexible process elements. We implemented our approach in a software tool called BPFlexTemplate, and tested it with the elicited variants.engBPMProcess variantsTemplate modelGeneralisationHealthcare processesSimilarity metricsjournal article10.12821/ijispm050304