Electronic Records and Business Process Oriented Management

The paper presents some ideas on how to make use of the methods to describe business processes within the change work (the organizational development) as a part of business process oriented management strategy for different aspects of the management of electronic records. Special attention is paid to the possibilities to co-ordinate the development of the methods for the description of business processes from the general management perspective with the need to develop the records management methodology in two different aspects.The first aspect is the possibility to develop the methods within the records creation area through the interaction with business process oriented management methodology. The belief of the author is that it is not possible to develop the methods for the creation of electronic records, without getting involved in the development of workflow and document management applications. The business process oriented approach to general management gives a lot of opportunities for the records manager, to define the interface between records management functionalities and other connected areas, such as workflow and document management.The other aspect discussed in the paper is the possibility to develop the methods within the records description area. As electronic records can be seen as the self created tools of the business processes within the organization and the scheduling and description of electronic records has to be a scheduling and description of these tools, the starting point for this description could be the description of the business processes made by the organization itself from a general management perspective, if the organization chooses a process oriented management strategy

A hybrid approach to workflow modelling

The increase in Business Process Management projects in the past decade has seen an increase in demand for business process modelling techniques. A rapidly growing aspect of BPM is the use of workflow management systems to automate routine and sequential processes. Workflows tend to move away from traditional definitions of business processes can often be forced to fit a model which does not suit its nature. Existing process modelling tools tend to be biased to either the informational, behavioural or object oriented aspect of the workflow. Because of this, models can often miss important aspects of a workflow. As well as managing the relationship between the types of model it is important to consider who will be using it as process models are useful in various ways. This paper reports on a case study in a manufacturing company where users were surveyed to see which are the notation that are most common in modelling based on two main categories (behavioural and informational). Research outcomes showed that there is no prevailing set of standards used for either of these categories, whilst most user feel the need to use more than one approach to model their system at any given time

Business Process Oriented Autopoietic Knowledge Management Support System Design

One of the approaches connected with the use of knowledge management systems in organisations is process oriented knowledge management. This approach assumes that knowledge management (KM) processes are focused on the aspect of their usage context in the form of tasks performed by business process participants. One of the trends in the development of process oriented knowledge management is treating such solutions as autopoietic systems. This approach assumes a range of additional characteristics of a technical and social solution being built. Autonomy, clearly defined boundaries of a system, lack of a direct impact on a system from outside, self-organisation and adaptation mechanisms required in such systems indicate the need for a new perspective on the integration. This paper will present analysis of the theory of process oriented knowledge management and an autopoietic system, as well as proposing a model for building such business process oriented autopoietic knowledge management support systems

Towards Aspects Identification in Business Process Through Process Mining

In business process models, elements can be scattered (repeated) within different processes, making it difficult to handle changes, analyze process for improvements, or check crosscutting impacts. These scattered elements are named as Aspects. Similar to the aspect-oriented paradigm in programming languages, in BPM, aspect handling has the goal to modularize the crosscutting concerns spread across the models. This process modularization facilitates the management of the process (reuse, maintenance and understanding). The current approaches for aspect identification are made manually; thus, resulting in the problem of subjectivity and lack of systematization. This paper proposes a method to automatically identify aspects in business process from its event logs. The method is based on mining techniques and it aims to solve the problem of the subjectivity identification made by specialists. The initial results from a preliminary evaluation showed evidences that the method identified correctly the aspects present in the process model

SALES ORGANIZATION AND FUNCTIONALITY IN COMPANIES ON THE INDUSTRIAL MARKET IN BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA

Selling and sales management is a new discipline and its importance is growing since companies are becoming more and more marketing oriented. The problem of modern business is not how to produce but how to sell the product. It means that there is no successful personal sale without effective sales management because more and more products need to be brought closer to the customer in the selling process. In this paper I will focus on one aspect of selling and sales management, sales organization and functionality. There are two methods of sales organization and functionality, empirical method and scientific method. The purpose of my research was to find out if the sales organization and functionality in Bosnia and Herzegovina companies was in accordance with the scientific method or empirical method. Despite the fact that the sources on selling and sales management are mostly focused on B2C (business to customer) market, my research was focused on B2B (business to business) market companies in order to find out if the theoretical aspects on sale and sales management on B2C market are applicable on B2B market. The objects of my research are five leading companies on Bosnian and Herzegovina industrial market.sales management, sales organization, marketing orientation, scientific method, empirical method.

PPINOT Tool Suite: a Performance Management Solution for Process-Oriented Organisations

A key aspect in any process-oriented organisation is the measurement of process performance for the achievement of its strategic and operational goals. Process Performance Indicators (PPIs) are a key asset to carry out this evaluation, and, therefore, the management of these PPIs throughout the whole BP lifecycle is crucial. in this demo we present PPINOT Tool Suite, a set of tools aimed at facilitating and automating the PPI management. The support includes their definition using either a graphical or a template-based textual notation, their automated analysis at design-time, and their automated computation based on the instrumentation of a Business Process Management System

THE HR IMPACT ON ROMANIAN UNIVERSITIES EDUCATION QUALITY

Higher education is the main supplier of experts who will lead in the near future the Romanian society and its integrated economy into the European Union. Obtaining a quality-oriented behavior is a major constraint in the actual process of real European integration of Romania, representing meanwhile a key aspect in gathering the economic prosperity as the nation longs for more than 20 years. A major importance in this respect has the educational component. It becomes obvious that all of the universities` work must be oriented towards increasing the competitiveness of the institution both at nationally and internationally level. This can be achieved through quality work and results, a performing management, an appropriate financial policy of the rational resources` use and gathering of the new resources, strengthening the international dimension of business and encouraging a responsible attitude by the staff side. For any higher education’s institution, the quality management must become the main path to increase its performance and prestige. Unfortunately, in many universities the quality management is confused with accreditation and the efforts are being made to achieving the standards` requirement, while continuous improvement is overlooked, followed closely by an element often not taken into account in the Romanian educational process: students` perspective.Higher education, Quality assurance, Continuous improvement, Human resources, Students` perspective

Service-Oriented Process Models in Telecommunication Business

The thesis concentrates on to evaluate challenges in the business process management and the need for Service-oriented process models in telecommunication business to alleviate the integration work efforts and to reduce total costs of ownership. The business aspect concentrates on operations and business support systems which are tailored for communication service providers. Business processes should be designed in conformance with TeleManagement Forum's integrated business architecture framework. The thesis rationalizes the need to transform organizations and their way of working from vertical silos to horizontal layers and to understand transformational efforts which are needed to adopt a new strategy. Furthermore, the thesis introduces service characterizations and goes deeper into technical requirements that a service compliant middleware system needs to support. At the end of the thesis Nokia Siemens Networks proprietary approach – Process Automation Enabling Suite is introduced, and finally the thesis performs two case studies. The first one is Nokia Siemens Networks proprietary survey which highlights the importance of customer experience management and the second one is an overall research study whose results have been derived from other public surveys covering application integration efforts

Business process model repositories : efficient process retrieval

As organizations increasingly work in process-oriented manner, the number of business process models that they develop and have to maintain increases. As a consequence, it has become common for organizations to have collections of hundreds or even thousands of business process models. When a collection contains such a large number of business process models, it is impossible to manage that collection manually. Therefore, Business Process (BP) Model Repositories are required that store large collections of process models and provide techniques for managing these collections automatically and efficiently. The goal of research described in this thesis is to improve on existing BP Model Repositories, by improving the management techniques that are supported by these repositories on an aspect that has received little attention so far. Looking ahead at the results of the research, the aspect that will be selected for improvement is the process retrieval aspect. The two main research activities that will be carried in the context of this research are the following. Firstly, a survey of Business Process Model Repositories is performed to identity an unsolved aspect to be enhanced. The functionality of existing BP Model Repositories is listed and summarized as a framework for BP Model Repositories. After comparing the functionality that is provided by existing BP Model Repositories, based on the framework, efficient process retrieval is selected as the aspect that will be improved. This aspect is selected, because, although existing BP Model Repositories provide techniques for process retrieval, none of them focus on the efficiency of process retrieval. Secondly, an indexing technique for process retrieval (both process similarity search and process querying) is proposed. The index is constructed using features of process models. Features are small and characteristic fragments of process models. As such, by matching features of a given query/search model and features of a process model in a collection, a small set of models in the collection that potentially match the query/search model can be retrieved efficiently through the index. Techniques are also proposed to further check whether a potential match is an actual match for the query/search model. All of the above techniques are implemented as a component of the AProMoRe (an Advanced Process Model Repository) process repository. To evaluate the proposed process retrieval techniques, experiments are run using both real-life and synthetic process model collections. Experimental results show that on average the process retrieval techniques proposed in this thesis performs at least one order of magnitude faster than existing techniques

Menadžment poslovnih procesa i znanja u hrvatskim poduzećima

Contemporary companies function in constantly changing and highly turbulent business environment which is the cause of a constant need for change and learning at individual, group, organizational as well as interorganizational level (61). Organizational learning is considered to be one of the most promising concepts in modern managerial literature. According to de Geus ‘ability to learn faster than your competitors might be the only sustainable competitive advantage you have’ (11). Dimovski (12) provides an overview of previous research and identifies four perspectives on organizational learning. His model manages to merge informational, interpretational, strategic and behavioral approach to organizational learning and defines it as a process of information acquisition, information interpretation and resulting behavioral and cognitive changes, which should in turn have an impact on organizational performance. In recent research, another measurement variable for organizational learning emerged – Information quality (18). Another research topic introduced in this research was determination and evaluation of the business process orientation construct. Although definitions of the business process orientation vary, we adopt the McCormack’s and Johnson’s (2001) definition of process orientation: An organization that, in all its thinking, emphasizes process as opposed to hierarchies with a special emphasis on outcomes and customer satisfaction. McCormack and Johnson (2001) conducted an empirical study to explore the relationship between BPO and enhanced business performance. The research results showed that BPO is critical in reducing conflict and encouraging greater connectedness within an organization, while improving business performance. The more business process oriented an organization, the better it performs both from an overall perspective as well as from the perspective of the employees. The BPO construct describes a four-step pathway for systematically advancing business processes along the maturity continuum (Ad Hoc, Defined, Linked, and Integrated level). Each step builds on the work of the previous steps to apply improvement strategies that are appropriate to the current maturity level. It is important to note that trying to skip maturity levels is counter-productive, since each level builds a foundation from which to achieve the subsequent level. An organization must evolve through these levels to establish a culture of process excellence. The goal of our contribution was to test differences in the way companies learn and perceive their business process orientation in Slovenia and Croatia. During September and October 2005 questionnaires were distributed to Slovenian and Croatian companies with more than 50 employees. In Slovenian case, 203 completed questionnaires were returned (which accounts for 16.5% response rate) while in Croatia 202 completed questionnaires were returned to the research group (which accounts for 11.5% response rate). Received questionnaires from both countries allow us to compare the results and to implicitly test the impact of various country-based factors on the organizational learning phenomena. Using data gathered from two independent samples (Slovenia and Croatia) analysis of variance method and t-test were used in order to get the answer to our research question relating to differences in organizational learning and business process orientation between Slovenian and Croatian companies. Results indicate that Slovenian and Croatian companies differ only in 17 out of 48 items considering organizational learning research – especially in the way they acquire information and the way they perceive behavioral and cognitive changes currently under place. Croatian companies are more outward directed when acquiring information and are witnessing more turbulent changes in their internal as well as external business environment. Nevertheless, there are much more similar traits in the way Slovenian and Croatian companies learn than there are dissimilarities. However, there are some indications that Slovenian companies already bridged the transition period, while majority of Croatian companies still has to cross that bridge. Data analysis considering second part of the research revealed some important aspects of business process orientation in Slovenia and Croatia. It showed that Slovenian companies have reached slightly higher maturity level than Croatian companies, which was not surprising considering Croatian contemporary history. Though statistically significant, the difference is not large and the general state of the BPO in both countries is promising. Still, a lot is left to change and improve in order to transform the companies into process-oriented ones. The investigation also revealed some differences between both counties. Slovenian companies give more emphasis to the quality of process data and have monitoring and control systems in place to assure it. Besides that jobs are more frequently multidimensional and not just simple tasks in Slovenia then in Croatia. This is important aspect of process orientation whereby employees need to be equipped with wide arsenal of knowledge and skills in order to participate in different areas of a process. To realize BPO projects, most companies use different business process modelling/management methods and tools, which integrate components for static and dynamic modelling, measuring and monitoring the performance of the processes, as well as enabling the transformation of business process diagrams into tailor-made applications supporting the execution of workflows. The focus of this paper is to discuss the application of business process oriented concepts in different areas, depending on different projects' objectives and goals. The paper provides the results of a search in literature as well as a summary and comparison of features concerning business process modelling and business process management tools, placing them within an empirically derived framework.menadžment poslovnih procesa, menadžment znanja