Repairing Alignments of Process Models

Process mining represents a collection of data driven techniques that support the analysis, understanding and improvement of business processes. A core branch of process mining is conformance checking, i.e., assessing to what extent a business process model conforms to observed business process execution data. Alignments are the de facto standard instrument to compute such conformance statistics. However, computing alignments is a combinatorial problem and hence extremely costly. At the same time, many process models share a similar structure and/or a great deal of behavior. For collections of such models, computing alignments from scratch is inefficient, since large parts of the alignments are likely to be the same. This paper presents a technique that exploits process model similarity and repairs existing alignments by updating those parts that do not fit a given process model. The technique effectively reduces the size of the combinatorial alignment problem, and hence decreases computation time significantly. Moreover, the potential loss of optimality is limited and stays within acceptable bounds

Design of Data-Driven Decision Support Systems for Business Process Standardization

Increasingly dynamic environments require organizations to engage in business process standardization (BPS) in response to environmental change. However, BPS depends on numerous contingency factors from different layers of the organization, such as strategy, business models (BMs), business processes (BPs) and application systems that need to be well-understood (“comprehended”) and taken into account by decision-makers for selecting appropriate standard BP designs that fit the organization. Besides, common approaches to BPS are non-data-driven and frequently do not exploit increasingly avail-able data in organizations. Therefore, this thesis addresses the following research ques-tion: “How to design data-driven decision support systems to increase the comprehen-sion of contingency factors on business process standardization?”. Theoretically grounded in organizational contingency theory (OCT), this thesis address-es the research question by conducting three design science research (DSR) projects to design data-driven decision support systems (DSSs) for SAP R/3 and S/4 HANA ERP systems that increase comprehension of BPS contingency factors. The thesis conducts the DSR projects at an industry partner within the context of a BPS and SAP S/4 HANA transformation program at a global manufacturing corporation. DSR project 1 designs a data-driven “Business Model Mining” system that automatical-ly “mines” BMs from data in application systems and represents results in an interactive “Business Model Canvas” (BMC) BI dashboard to comprehend BM-related BPS con-tingency factors. The project derives generic design requirements and a blueprint con-ceptualization for BMM systems and suggests an open, standardized reference data model for BMM. The project implements the software artifact “Business Model Miner” in Microsoft Azure / PowerBI and demonstrates technical feasibility by using data from an educational SAP S/4 HANA system, an open reference dataset, and three real-life SAP R/3 ERP systems. A field evaluation with 21 managers at the industry partner finds differences between tool results and BMCs created by managers and thus the po-tential for a complementary role of BMM tools to enrich the comprehension of BMs. A further controlled laboratory experiment with 142 students finds significant beneficial impacts on subjective and objective comprehension in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and relative efficiency. Second, DSR project 2 designs a data-driven process mining DSS “KeyPro” to semi-automatically discover and prioritize the set of BPs occurring in an organization from log data to concentrate BPS initiatives on important BPs given limited organizational resources. The project derives objective and quantifiable BP importance metrics from BM and BPM literature and implements KeyPro for SAP R/3 ERP and S/4 HANA sys-tems in Microsoft SQL Server / Azure and interactive PowerBI dashboards. A field evaluation with 52 managers compares BPs detected manually by decision-makers against BPs discovered by KeyPro and reveals significant differences and a complemen-tary role of the artifact to deliver additional insights into the set of BPs in the organiza-tion. Finally, a controlled laboratory experiment with 30 students identifies the dash-boards with the lowest comprehension for further development. Third, OCT requires organizations to select a standard BP design that matches contin-gencies. Thus, DSR project 3 designs a process mining DSS to select a standard BP from a repository of different alternative designs based on the similarity of BPS contin-gency factors between the as-is process and the to-be standard processes. DSR project 3 thus derives four different process model variants for representing BPS contingency factors that vary according to determinant factors of process model comprehension (PMC) identified in PMC literature. A controlled laboratory evaluation with 150 stu-dents identifies significant differences in PMC. Based on laboratory findings, the DSS is implemented in the BPM platform “Apromore” to select standard BP reference mod-els from the SAP Best Practices Explorer for SAP S/4 HANA and applied for the pur-chase-to-pay and order-to-cash process of a manufacturing company

Industry Structure Similarities, Trade Agreements, and Business Cycle Synchronization

This paper analyzes the effects of industry structure similarities, free trade agreements, and geographic borders on regional business cycle correlation, using fifty US states, 10 Canadian provinces, and 1 Canadian territory as a case study. Using two cross-sectional OLS regressions and one panel data OLS regression, this study finds that pair-wise gross territorial product growth correlation decreased significantly after NAFTA ratification for state-state, province-province, and state-province territorial pairs, contrary to previous literature’s results. NAFTA effectively decoupled intra-national business cycles in the US and Canada while also desynchronizing cross-border pair-wise GSP growth correlation, but cross-border pair-wise GSP growth correlation was much less desynchronized post-NAFTA relative to intra-national pairs. These results indicate that NAFTA and the US-Canada border may produce two opposing forces that dampen each other’s desynchronizing effects

Ontology Driven Web Extraction from Semi-structured and Unstructured Data for B2B Market Analysis

The Market Blended Insight project1 has the objective of improving the UK business to business marketing performance using the semantic web technologies. In this project, we are implementing an ontology driven web extraction and translation framework to supplement our backend triple store of UK companies, people and geographical information. It deals with both the semi-structured data and the unstructured text on the web, to annotate and then translate the extracted data according to the backend schema

Forum Session at the First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC03)

The First International Conference on Service Oriented Computing (ICSOC) was held in Trento, December 15-18, 2003. The focus of the conference ---Service Oriented Computing (SOC)--- is the new emerging paradigm for distributed computing and e-business processing that has evolved from object-oriented and component computing to enable building agile networks of collaborating business applications distributed within and across organizational boundaries. Of the 181 papers submitted to the ICSOC conference, 10 were selected for the forum session which took place on December the 16th, 2003. The papers were chosen based on their technical quality, originality, relevance to SOC and for their nature of being best suited for a poster presentation or a demonstration. This technical report contains the 10 papers presented during the forum session at the ICSOC conference. In particular, the last two papers in the report ere submitted as industrial papers

Entrepreneurial discovery and exploitation processes: sequence or symbiosis?

This study examined the effect that temporal order within the entrepreneurial discovery-exploitation process has on the outcomes of venture creation. Consistent with sequential theories of discovery-exploitation, the general flow of venture creation was found to be directed from discovery toward exploitation in a random sample of nascent ventures. However, venture creation attempts which specifically follow this sequence derive poor outcomes. Moreover, simultaneous discovery-exploitation was the most prevalent temporal order observed, and venture attempts that proceed in this manner more likely become operational. These findings suggest that venture creation is a multi-scale phenomenon that is at once directional in time, and simultaneously driven by symbiotically coupled discovery and exploitation

Semantic-driven matchmaking of web services using case-based reasoning

With the rapid proliferation of Web services as the medium of choice to securely publish application services beyond the firewall, the importance of accurate, yet flexible matchmaking of similar services gains importance both for the human user and for dynamic composition engines. In this paper, we present a novel approach that utilizes the case based reasoning methodology for modelling dynamic Web service discovery and matchmaking. Our framework considers Web services execution experiences in the decision making process and is highly adaptable to the service requester constraints. The framework also utilises OWL semantic descriptions extensively for implementing both the components of the CBR engine and the matchmaking profile of the Web services

An Ontology-Based Method for Semantic Integration of Business Components

Building new business information systems from reusable components is today an approach widely adopted and used. Using this approach in analysis and design phases presents a great interest and requires the use of a particular class of components called Business Components (BC). Business Components are today developed by several manufacturers and are available in many repositories. However, reusing and integrating them in a new Information System requires detection and resolution of semantic conflicts. Moreover, most of integration and semantic conflict resolution systems rely on ontology alignment methods based on domain ontology. This work is positioned at the intersection of two research areas: Integration of reusable Business Components and alignment of ontologies for semantic conflict resolution. Our contribution concerns both the proposal of a BC integration solution based on ontologies alignment and a method for enriching the domain ontology used as a support for alignment.Comment: IEEE New Technologies of Distributed Systems (NOTERE), 2011 11th Annual International Conference; ISSN: 2162-1896 Print ISBN: 978-1-4577-0729-2 INSPEC Accession Number: 12122775 201