Using spreadsheets in production planning in a pharmaceutical company

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementLiving in the technological era, a successful company nowadays is the company that integrates Information Technology (IT) with its business. Otherwise, it might face a huge risk of not being able to survive in today’s market against the huge competition that is highly influenced by IT. However, integrating IT with business is not so simple due to several factors, namely: the available resources, choosing the right solution, top management support, time constraints, and finally achieving the proper user training and adoption. It is obviously not so wise to keep on waiting until all these obstacles are solved when there is a possibility of using some of the available resources such as Microsoft Office tools that might ease several processes of the business until the needed system is implemented and used. In a supply chain, as a supplier or a manufacturer, production usually follows a production plan that is typically created by the supply planning department. A production plan relies on a demand forecast, whereas a demand forecast usually relies on historical data, but the market demand changes and a forecast does not always match the demand, so whenever there is a change in the forecast, production plans are updated accordingly (Graves, 2011). Therefore, if we are looking to optimize the supply chain, it is necessary to build a strong relationship between the supply chain partners because their collaboration becomes vital in such a scenario. This collaboration means that the partners of the supply chain must share their information with each other (Groznik & Maslaric, 2012). Such information can be about the inventory stock levels of the customer towards the supplier which helps in optimizing the Reorder Level that is defined as “the point at which the company will reorder stock” (Meng, 2006), resulting in creating more successful production plans that matches the market demand. However, these processes can hardly be done and managed manually, theyactually require the help of an IT system that is integrated with the supply chain for achieving the expected results. Aligning IT with the supply chain and using e-business to manage the relationship between suppliers and customers can lower costs, this is due to the fact that IT can contribute in supporting the collaboration and coordination through an easy way of information sharing between the partners of the supply chain (Auramo, Kauremaa, & Tanskanen, 2005). Moreover, using IT in a supply chain does not necessarily need to be costly or difficult to use; insteadspreadsheets for instance can be used for Inventory Planning that is defined as “figuring out what your inventory should be (not counting what you have)” (Estep, 2012). Even though using spreadsheet tools such as Microsoft Office tools does not require purchasing an IT system, it is still considered a type of integrating IT with a business process that can significantly improve the supply chain

A lightweight BPMN extension for business process-oriented requirements engineering

Process-oriented requirements engineering approaches are often required to deal with the effective adaptation of existing processes in order to easily introduce new or updated requirements. Such approaches are based on the adoption of widely used notations, such as the one introduced by the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) standard. However, BPMN models do not convey enough information on the involved entities and how they interact with process activities, thus leading to ambiguities, as well as to incomplete and inconsistent requirements definitions. This paper proposes an approach that allows stakeholders and software analysts to easily merge and integrate behavioral and data properties in a BPMN model, so as to fully exploit the potential of BPMN without incurring into the aforementioned limitation. The proposed approach introduces a lightweight BPMN extension that specifically addresses the annotation of data properties in terms of constraints, i.e., pre- and post-conditions that the different process activities must satisfy. The visual representation of the annotated model conveys all the information required both by stakeholders, to understand and validate requirements, and by software analysts and developers, to easily map these updates to the corresponding software implementation. The presented approach is illustrated by use of two running examples, which have also been used to carry out a preliminary validation activity

Towards a business process model warehouse framework

This dissertation focuses on the re-use of business process reference models, available in a business process model warehouse, to enable the definition of more comprehensive business requirements. It proposes a business process model warehouse framework to promote the re-use of multiple business process reference models and the flexible visualisation of business process models. The critical success factor for such a framework is that it should contribute to minimise to some extent the causes of inadequate business requirements. The proposed framework is based on an analogy with a data warehouse framework, consisting of the following components: usage of multiple business process reference models as source models, the conceptual design of a process to extract, load and transform multiple business process reference models into a repository, a description of repository functionality for managing enterprise architecture artefacts, and motivation of flexible visualisation of business process models to ensure more comprehensive business requirements.Computer Science (School of Computing)M.Sc. (Information Systems

Étude des phases en amont des projets d'adoption des technologies RFID pour l'amélioration des chaînes d'approvisionnement

Problématique et objectifs de recherche -- Les technologies RFID et le réseau EPC -- Cadre conceptuel et contexte d'innovation -- University-based living lab for managing the front-end of innovation : the case of RFID implementation -- The potential of RFID in warehousing activities in a retail industry supply chain -- Key performance indicators for the evaluation of RFID enabled B-TO-B ecommerce applications : the case of fivelayer supply chain