The basic goal of reengineering is to reduce the complexity of a legacy system in order to keep its maintenance costs at an acceptable level. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) mainly focuses on the redesign of business processes in an organization in order to improve the relevant performance and efficiency factors influencing the processes, such as cost and speed, and also to promote the quality of the products produced. Among the different methods and techniques proposed for BPR, the pattern-oriented approach has received considerable attention by researchers. In this approach, the concept of patterns -successful solutions to recurring problems - is applied in the context of BPR in order to extract and integrate the successful methods used in the reengineering of business processes.
On the other hand, due to the ever-changing nature of organizational environments and the volatility of market conditions, there exists no all-encompassing BPR method which could be used in a broad range of organizations. This is where the application of Situational Method Engineering (SME) becomes essential for the construction and customization of existing BPR methodologies.

The main goal of this research is to propose an approach for the situational method engineering of pattern-oriented BPR processes based on EPFC - a commonly-used SME tool. The resulting product can be used by method engineers to construct custom pattern-oriented BPR methodologies in EPFC. To this aim, as the first step, an analytical survey will be conducted on BPR processes, patterns and methodologies. This is expected to result in the extraction and introduction of a set of BPR process patterns, based on which a BPR pattern-oriented process metamodel will be proposed. As the next step, the proposed metamodel and its relevant process patterns will be implemented in EPFC. The outcome of this phase is a paradigm-based method engineering framework for BPR, which will be evaluated and validated through application in a small-scale SME project.