Building Enterprise Transition Plans Through the Development of Collapsing Design Structure Matrices

The United States Air Force (USAF), like many other large enterprises, has evolved over time, expanded its capabilities and has developed focused, yet often redundant, operational silos, functions and information systems (IS). Recent failures in enterprise integration efforts herald a need for a new method that can account for the challenges presented by decades of increases in enterprise complexity, redundancy and Operations and Maintenance (O&M) costs. Product or system-level research has dominated the study of traditional Design Structure Matrices (DSMs) with minimal coverage on enterprise-level issues. This research proposes a new method of collapsing DSMs (C-DSMs) to illustrate and mitigate the problem of enterprise IS redundancy while developing a systems integration plan. Through the use of iterative user constraints and controls, the C-DSM method employs an algorithmic and unbiased approach that automates the creation of a systems integration plan that provides not only a roadmap for complexity reduction, but also cost estimates for milestone evaluation. Inspired by a recent large IS integration program, an example C-DSM of 100 interrelated legacy systems was created. The C-DSM method indicates that if a slow path to integration is selected then cost savings are estimated to surpass integration costs after several iterations

Service design from staffing to outsourcing

The term outsourcing has become a conventional means of describing anything associated with the transaction of services that enables client organisations to blur core activities and thereby reduce their internal workforce and costs. The main objective of this study is confirming a gap in detailed and spe-cific reviews of formats and economic transactions through non-standard forms of employment, namely in a service design model from Staffing to Outsourcing. The literature review was performed using text mining and topic modelling techniques to group relevant topics and decreases the likelihood of human bias, while bringing robustness to the analysis. The results are reflected in a conceptual state of the art diagram that will serve as a basis to new discussions.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

"Is There a Wage Payoff to Innovative Work Practices?"

During the 1980s, wage inequality increased dramatically and the American economy lost many high wage, low- to medium-skill jobs, which had provided middle class incomes to less skilled workers. Increasingly, less skilled workers seemed restricted to low wage jobs lacking union or other institutional protections. Although "good" jobs for less skilled workers are unlikely to return in their previous form, a number of sociologists, economists, and industrial relations scholars have suggested that a new paradigm of work, often called "high performance," is emerging, which offers such workers more skilled jobs and higher wages. Using a unique national data set we find little evidence that high performance work systems are associated with higher wages.

Experimental Evaluation of a Process Benchmarking Tool in a Green Business Process Management Context

Using a combination of metamodels, ontologies, green performance indicators and metrics, we apply a novel approach in Semantic Business Process Benchmarking to the area of Green Business Process Management (Green BPM). Up to now, process benchmarking has mainly been a manual process; the approach described and empirically evaluated in this paper partially automates the time-consuming and costly process analyses while introducing more flexibility regarding varying terminology, level of abstraction and modeling notation. Also, overviews of literature relevant to the field of Green Semantic BPM and commonly applied metrics in a Green BPM context are given

Application of Process Mining in Managerial Accounting: A Case Study of an Investments and Securities Firm

Technology ManagementBusiness process mining techniques use event logs recorded from information systems to extract and discover useful process and organizational information. Over the past couple of decades, many new and powerful process mining techniques have been developed by researchers and software vendors. Although numerous case studies demonstrating the applicability of process mining have been emerging in literature, there has yet to be an application of process mining in the financial sector. In this paper, we explore the applicability of process mining of an investments and securities firm, more specifically investigating its managerial accounting processes. Using an assortment of process mining techniques available in the ProM framework, we examine and discover clear differences between the AS-IS model stated by the financial firm and the process model extracted from the event logs. This research aims to accomplish the following: a) add to the current process mining application literature by examining the applicability of process mining in the financial sector, b) utilize various process mining techniques to observe and assess process information in the specific managerial accounting case study of the monthly profit and loss computation process, c) identify the strengths of process mining and how they can supplement the weaknesses of business process reengineering, and d) address the possibility that event log data with insufficient case sizes needs to be addressed differently than past approaches with data with sufficient case sizes.ope

Organizational Change in French Manufacturing: What Do We Learn From Firm Representatives and From Their Employees?

In this paper, we use a French matched employer-employee survey, the COI survey, conducted in 1997, to describe the general features of organizational change in manufacturing firms with more than 50 employees. In a first section, we explore the methodological issues associated with the building up of a statistical measure of organizational change, we describe the COI survey and we present the set of firm level and employee level variables that we have selected to investigate organizational change. In a second section, we present the results of two correspondence analysis, one conducted on a sample of 1462 firms from the COI survey and the other one conducted on the sample of 2049 blue collar workers affiliated to those firms. On one hand, using the firm level section of the survey, we show that all types of new organizational practices are positively correlated with one another. On the other hand, at the blue collar level, three main dimensions discriminate between jobs: the intensity of involvement in information processing and decision, the intensity of constraints weighing on the content and rhythm of work and the orientation of information and production flows: either pushed by colleagues or pulled by the market. We also find that blue collars cannot develop a high level of involvement in information processing and decisions and have at the same time their work rhythm fixed by heavy technical constraints whereas high time pressure imposed on work rhythm by the market is positively correlated with such an involvement. Finally, if we correlate firm level and worker level variables, we find that an increase in the use of 'employee involvement' and 'quality' practices by the firm is positively correlated both with a higher level of blue collars' involvement in information processing and decision and with a higher level of technical constraints, production flows being pushed by colleagues rather than pulled by the market. The mapping of firm level responses stemming from our first correspondence analysis has been used to select 4 firms in different areas of the statistical universe and belonging to the with executives from these firms and plant visit are used to check the quality of our statistical data and to better understand our descriptive results.

An Analytical Approach to Lean Six Sigma Deployment Strategies: Project Identification and Prioritization

abstract: The ever-changing economic landscape has forced many companies to re-examine their supply chains. Global resourcing and outsourcing of processes has been a strategy many organizations have adopted to reduce cost and to increase their global footprint. This has, however, resulted in increased process complexity and reduced customer satisfaction. In order to meet and exceed customer expectations, many companies are forced to improve quality and on-time delivery, and have looked towards Lean Six Sigma as an approach to enable process improvement. The Lean Six Sigma literature is rich in deployment strategies; however, there is a general lack of a mathematical approach to deploy Lean Six Sigma in a global enterprise. This includes both project identification and prioritization. The research presented here is two-fold. Firstly, a process characterization framework is presented to evaluate processes based on eight characteristics. An unsupervised learning technique, using clustering algorithms, is then utilized to group processes that are Lean Six Sigma conducive. The approach helps Lean Six Sigma deployment champions to identify key areas within the business to focus a Lean Six Sigma deployment. A case study is presented and 33% of the processes were found to be Lean Six Sigma conducive. Secondly, having identified parts of the business that are lean Six Sigma conducive, the next steps are to formulate and prioritize a portfolio of projects. Very often the deployment champion is faced with the decision of selecting a portfolio of Lean Six Sigma projects that meet multiple objectives which could include: maximizing productivity, customer satisfaction or return on investment, while meeting certain budgetary constraints. A multi-period 0-1 knapsack problem is presented that maximizes the expected net savings of the Lean Six Sigma portfolio over the life cycle of the deployment. Finally, a case study is presented that demonstrates the application of the model in a large multinational company. Traditionally, Lean Six Sigma found its roots in manufacturing. The research presented in this dissertation also emphasizes the applicability of the methodology to the non-manufacturing space. Additionally, a comparison is conducted between manufacturing and non-manufacturing processes to highlight the challenges in deploying the methodology in both spaces.Dissertation/ThesisPh.D. Industrial Engineering 201

Design methodologies for product oriented manufacturing systems

This paper presents a review of design methodologies for production systems, with focus on Product Oriented Manufacturing Systems (POMS). POMS organization is discussed and compared against production systems concepts. The methodologies are described and grouped in three classes: generic, specific and focused, if they provide a generic solution like a product, a tool or a system; only one type of solution, e.g., a production system or guides through a implementation of a particular instance of a production system, e.g., Toyota Production System implementation. The focused class of the methodologies is also divided in two groups: methodologies for designing new production systems, referred as construction methodologies for production systems, and methodologies for reengineering existing systems, referred as improvement methodologies. A better grasp of production systems design needs is given through a brief introduction to the GCD design methodology developed by the authors. Moreover the GCD methodology is put in perspective showing differences and design suitability in relation to the reviewed methodologies

Lean Implementation Considerations in Factory Operations of Low Volume/High Complexity Production Systems

The researchers of the Lean Aircraft Initiative developed a hypothesized lean implementation model seeking to provide its members guidance on implementing lean transitions in factory operations of low volume/high complexity production systems. The model features four phases: (1) building a lean infrastructure to support lean behavior, (2) redesigning the flow of products in the factory, (3) revamping the operations management and (4) fostering process improvement. An order of implementation is discussed and each phase has implementation steps as well. Following the development of the hypothesized lean implementation model, twelve case studies were used to test the model. This report details the model and analyzes the case studies using the model as a framework