BUSINESS INTELLIGENT AGENTS FOR ENTERPRISE APPLICATION

Fierce competition in a market increasingly crowded and frequent changes in consumer requirements are the main forces that will cause companies to change their current organization and management. One solution is to move to open architectures and virtual type, which requires addressing business methods and technologies using distributed multi-agent systems. Intelligent agents are one of the most important areas of artificial intelligence that deals with the development of hardware and software systems able to reason, learn to recognize natural language, speak, make decisions, to recognize objects in the working environment etc. Thus in this paper, we presented some aspects of smart business, intelligent agents, intelligent systems, intelligent systems models, and I especially emphasized their role in managing business processes, which have become highly complex systems that are in a permanent change to meet the requirements of timely decision making. The purpose of this paper is to prove that there is no business without using the integration Business Process Management, Web Services and intelligent agents.business intelligence, intelligent agents, intelligent systems, management, enterprise, web services

Robotic process automation for inventory control and management: a case of Freight Forwarders Solutions

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Mobile Telecommunications and Innovation (MSc. MTI) at Strathmore UniversityLogistics services are a lifeline for most business enterprises. These services cannot be provided efficiently with an ineffective inventory management system in place. Technological advancements enable enterprises acquire information systems to improve operational efficiency. Manual data entry into warehouse management systems has a myriad of setbacks including: High error rates; Slow turnaround time; Investment in additional personnel to countercheck the accuracy of manually entered data; Increased error rates due to unexpected spikes in manual data entry; Deviation of attention from tasks that are cognitive based to those that are rules based resulting in decreased employee productivity. Robotic process automation, a disruptive, new technology leveraging on artificial intelligence was used in this study to automate the business processes performed in the inventory control and management module of a warehouse management system. Relevant literature was reviewed to better understand how the technology has been implemented in other organisations. The waterfall model was selected for development of the software robots due to its applicability in the selection of business processes best suited for automation as well as throughout the development lifecycle of the robots. Processes that were selected for automation had the following characteristics: mundane, manual, repetitive, rule-based, labour and time intensive. The developed solution delivered several benefits to the organisation including: Increased accuracy of the information captured in the system; Reduction in error rates during data capture; Significant reduction in time consumed during execution of tasks; Cost savings due to reduction in operational costs; Process improvements due to streamlining; Increased productivity, quality and compliance; and Redeployment of employees to higher value functions. Results from solutions testing showed that majority of the respondents agreed that the software robots had attained the desired results. The aim of this research paper was to explore ways through which technology could be leveraged to transform manual business processes into automated and streamlined processes through robotic process automation technology. The conclusions drawn indicated that process automation increases operational efficiency and employee productivity through redeployment to more cognitive based tasks

Analysis and design of document centric workflows for automating tasks in a multi-tenant cloud archive solution

Information Lifecycle Governance (ILG) is a cross functional business initiative intended to align the cost of information with its value to the enterprise, increase transparency and control and reduce the risk of legal and regulatory obligations for data. It is this dynamic workload system that enables the users to analyze, formalize and optimize for a cloud environment such for being able to provide a fully managed "Archive as a Service" in private and public clouds. In this context of the Master Thesis a research on the possibilities on how to improve and optimize the information lifecycle governance workloads especially in the context of cloud environments. It looks for a formal definition of the individual ILG workflows using Process management concepts with a Process Engine can be used. The main goal is to allow the definition of generic ILG tasks in a declarative way and to guarantee transactional integrity and check-point restarting capabilities. An end user subscribes to SaaS archive service in the cloud has to move data off-premise and delete data management processes to the service provider without comprising data security and privacy. The first scenario is to evaluate on various workload management solution with document centric workflows. The second scenario to investigate describes the use case where a recurring batch load system periodically imports valuable business data in to the SmartCloud Archive. The thesis also proposes the architecture for the required uses to create the batch load and disposal sweep tasks in an enterprise perspective by eliminating administrative client for SmartCloud Content Management System. The architecture proposed moves the data off the premise into a cloud environment and thereafter managed in an automated way. The management of the data had been made to flexible, easy, reliable and efficient

Assessing BPM’s role in a digital innovation project

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Information Systems and Technologies ManagementThe world is changing. In the digitalization era, digital devices are everywhere, enabled by the quick proliferation of smart and connected products. The transformation we are witnessing is not only about the new digital artefacts, but also includes the alignment of the operations, business processes, strategy and organizational, and IT structures, resulting in the so-called maturity. Although it might not be trivial, this increased efficiency is closely connected with the processes, of how to create opportunities for optimizing and redesigning them. However, the combination of digital innovation and business process management, and how one benefits the other, is not very explored in the literature, which constitutes a research gap. Given this, the importance of business process management practices and their relationship with the remaining organisation’s dimensions was studied and assessed through a comprehensive and systematic literature review. Hence, insights were gathered to create a framework that allows answering the research question “What is the BPM’s role in a digital innovation project?”. It was expected to understand the challenges associated with digital transformation, what core requirements are the most valuable, and what is the role of process management in all of it. A focus group has confirmed the usefulness of the artefact, by showing the correlation between the different elements in scope and allowing an understanding of the capabilities needed in the organisation. Nonetheless, the feedback suggested the adaptation of the framework to include a maturity assessment pre-stage and cost evaluation per digital transformation category, so it can be completely transversal to all types of organisations and all budgets

Unknown Exception Handling Tool Using Humans as Agents

In a typical workflow process, exceptions are the norm. Exceptions are defined as deviations from the normal sequence of activities and events. Exceptions can be divided into two broad categories: known exceptions (i.e., expected and predefined deviations) and unknown exceptions (i.e., unexpected and undefined deviations). Business Process Execution Language (BPEL) has become the de facto standard for executing business workflows with the use of web services. BPEL includes exception handling methods that are sufficient for known exception scenarios. Depending on the exception and the specifics of the exception handling tools, processes may either halt or move to completion. Instances of processes that are halted or left incomplete due to unhandled exceptions affect the performance of the workflow process, as they increase resource utilization and process completion time. However, designing efficient process handlers to avoid the issue of unhandled exceptions is not a simple task. This thesis provides a tool that handles unknown exceptions using provisions for exception handling with the involvement of human activities by using the BPEL4PEOPLE specification. BPEL4PEOPLE, an extension of BPEL, offers the ability to specify human activities within BPEL processes. The approach considered in this thesis involves humans in exception handling tools by providing an alternate sub process within a given business process. A prototype application has been developed implementing the tool that handles unknown exceptions. The prototype application monitors the progress of an automated workflow process and permits human involvement to reroute the course of a workflow process when an unknown exception occurs. The utility of the prototype and the tool using the Scenario Walkthrough and Inspection Methods (SWIMs) are demonstrated. We demonstrate the utility of the tool through loan application process scenarios, and offer a walkthrough of the system by using examples of instances with examples of known and unknown exceptions, as well as a claims analysis of process instances results

Model-Agnostic process modelling

Modeling techniques in Business Process Management often suffer from low adoption due to the variety of profiles found in organizations. This project aims to provide a novel alternative to BPM documentation, ATD, based on annotated process descriptions in natural language