Context modeling and constraints binding in web service business processes

Context awareness is a principle used in pervasive services applications to enhance their exibility and adaptability to changing conditions and dynamic environments. Ontologies provide a suitable framework for context modeling and reasoning. We develop a context model for executable business processes { captured as an ontology for the web services domain. A web service description is attached to a service context profile, which is bound to the context ontology. Context instances can be generated dynamically at services runtime and are bound to context constraint services. Constraint services facilitate both setting up constraint properties and constraint checkers, which determine the dynamic validity of context instances. Data collectors focus on capturing context instances. Runtime integration of both constraint services and data collectors permit the business process to achieve dynamic business goals

Understanding Business Process Quality

Abstract Organizations have taken benefit from quality management prac-tices in manufacturing and logistics with respect to competitiveness as well as profitability. At the same time, an ever-growing share of the organizational value chain centers around transactional administrative processes addressed by business process management concepts, e.g. in finance and accounting. Integrating these fields is thus very promising from a management perspec-tive. Obtaining a clear understanding of business process quality constitutes the most important prerequisite in this respect. However, related approaches have not yet provided an effective solution to this issue. In this chapter, we consider effectiveness requirements towards business process quality concepts from a management perspective, compare existing approaches from various fields, deduct a definition framework from organizational targets, and take initial steps towards practical adoption. These steps provide fundamental in-sights into business process quality, and contribute to obtain a clear grasp of what constitutes a good business process.

Basic Considerations on Business Process Quality

Quality management practices in manufacturing and logistics have led to proven results for organisations with respect to competitiveness and protability. At the same time, business process management not only addresses a comprehensive functional scope including the ever more important administrative functions and business services, but also contributes to realising potentials (e.g. in the field of process automation) through extensive use of information technology. Integrating quality management with business process management concepts is thus very promising from a business perspective. The evolution of a clear understanding of business process quality constitutes a fundamental prerequisite for progress in this field as only a concise definition will point out the issues that need to be addressed in more detailed research. This report aims at discussing basic considerations in this respect. We look into requirements to be posed towards a definition of business process quality, discuss various basic quality views and their fit with business process management, provide a fundamental if not yet practically applicable business process quality definition, and examine related aspects of business processes as well as related work. While this approach will not lead to a finally applicable definition of business process quality, its contribution will lie in entering into a more systematic discussion to encompass the wide array of existing results that can be correlated with business process quality and giving directions for future research

Business Process Quality Management

During the past 25 years, research in the field of business process management as well as the practical adoption of corresponding methods and tools have made substantial progress. In particular, this development was driven by the insight that well-managed business processes enable organizations to better serve their stakeholders, save costs and, ultimately, realize competitive advantage. It is therefore not surprising that improving business processes ranks high on the list of priorities of organizations. In practice, this challenge is currently being addressed through approaches such as benchmarking, industry-specific best practice reference models or process reengineering heuristics. However, no systematic and generic proposition towards managing business process quality has achieved broad acceptance yet. To address this gap, this thesis contributes to the field of business process quality management with the results lined out in the following. First, it defines a concise notion of business process quality based on organizational targets, and applies it to a sample real-world case. This definition is not specific to any particular application field, and thus constitutes a vital first step towards systematic and generic business process quality management. On that basis, an approach is developed to model business objectives in the sense of the requirements that shall be fulfilled by the results of a business process. In turn, this approach enables appraising if a business process achieves its business objective as one of the core criteria relevant to business process quality. Further, this thesis proposes extensions to common business process meta-models which enable quality-aware business process modeling, and demonstrates how fundamental quality characteristics can be derived from corresponding models. At this stage, the results achieved have enabled an advanced understanding of business process quality. By means of these insights, a model of business process quality attributes with corresponding quality criteria is developed. This model complements and exceeds preceding approaches since, for the first time, it systematically derives relevant quality attributes from a business process management perspective instead of adopting these from related fields. It enables appraising business process quality independently of a particular field of application, and deriving recommendations to improve the processes assessed. To enable practical adoption of the concepts developed, the integration of procedures and functionality relevant to quality in business process management lifecycles and system landscapes is discussed next. To establish the contribution of this thesis beyond the previous state of the art, the proposed quality model is then compared to existing business process reengineering practices as well as propositions in the area of business process quality. Further, quality attributes are employed to improve a substantial real-world business process. This experience report demonstrates how quality management practices can be applied even if quality-aware system landscapes are not in place yet. It thus contributes to bridging the gap between the research results proposed in this thesis and the conditions present in practice today. Finally, remaining limitations with regard to the research objectives pursued are discussed, and challenges for future research are lined out. Addressing the latter will enable further leveraging the potentials of business process quality management

Impact of Business Process Redesign on MNE's performance in South Africa

Thesis (M.M. (Entrepreneurship and New Venture Creation))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, Graduate School of Business Administration, 2014.This research evaluated the perceived impact of business process re-engineering (BPR) implementation on Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) in terms of: cost, turnaround time, quality, employees’ skills, knowledge, behaviour and attitudes. BPR is defined as a change of the overall process, entity structure, business management systems, personnel responsibilities and measurements of performance, developing skills, and using the information technology. The assessment was around the MNEs operating in South Africa (SA) within the motor manufacturing industry. A potential problem is that BPR which could lead to innovation and or job creation can also lead to job losses. In terms of job losses, that could be a problem for SA, which planned to create 80000 jobs from the manufacturing sector by 2020. This research is different in the sense that it evaluated the perceived impact of BPR implementation by using the questionnaires, and the evaluation was validated by data calculated from the annual report of MNEs

PAIS-DQ: Extending Process-Aware Information Systems to support Data Quality in PAIS life-cycle

The successful execution of a Business Process implies to use data with an adequate level of quality, thereby enabling the output of processes to be obtained in accordance with users requirements. The necessity to be aware of the data quality in the business processes is known, but the problem is how the incorporation of data quality management can affect and increase the complexity of the software development that supports the business process life-cycle. In order to gain advantages that data quality management can provide, organizations need to introduce mechanisms aimed at checking whether data satisfies the established data-quality requirements. Desirably, the implementation, deployment and use of these mechanisms should not interfere into the regular working of the business processes. In order to enable this independence, we propose the PAIS-DQ framework as an extension of the classical Process-Aware Information System (PAIS) proposal. The PAIS-DQ addresses the concerns related to data quality management activities by minimizing the required time for the software developers. In addition, with the aim of guiding developers in the use of PAIS-DQ, a methodology has been also provided to facilitate organizations to deal with complex concerns. The methodology renders our proposal applicable in practice, and has been applied to a case study where a service architecture implementing the standard ISO/IEC 8000-100:2009 parts 100 to 140 is included.Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2015-63502Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2012-37493-C03-0

Βελτιστοποίηση επιχειρησιακών διαδικασιών βασισμένη σε προγραμματισμό περιορισμών

Διπλωματική εργασία--Πανεπιστήμιο Μακεδονίας, Θεσσαλονίκη, 2019.During the last two decades a change occurred in the dialectics of Business Administration science about the principles that should rule the organizational structure of a company. A structural model based on business processes that run through the business entity horizontally and/or vertically, is gradually replacing the traditional strategy that stratifies the functional entity in distinct and isolated hierarchical levels. A business process can be defined as a set of coordinated activities aiming at the successful realization of a business goal and the production of surplus value. Therefore, the design and the implementation of a process can significantly affect the efficiency of an organization's operation and the quality that the consumer receives from the produced outcome. The significance of planning and managing the business processes for the survival of a company in the modern globalized economic environment, demonstrates the need for the development of computational systems that can assist the effort for the improvement or re-engineering of processes in regard to quantitative and qualitative criteria. Considering that the constraint logic programming can offer the computational means for the confrontation of complex combinatorial problems, the aim of this thesis is to design and develop a system that can compose optimized complex business processes from simple tasks based on predefined evaluation criteria. The proposed system is consisted by four collaborating software modules. The database that stores the simple tasks in the appropriate quantitative representation for the optimization procedure. The graphical user interface (GUI) that accepts the required input by the decision maker and creates the constraint logic program using the programming language Prolog. The ECLiPSe platform executes the logic program to determine the feasible processes for specific input and output resource data sets, and construct the processes with the optimum evaluation. Finally, the visualization subsystem translates the quantitative representation of the optimized business processes into a graphical form

Demonstrating the Effectiveness of Process Improvement Patterns

Improving the operational efficiency of processes is an important goal of business process management (BPM). There exist many proposals with regard to process improvement patterns (PIPs) as practices that aim at supporting this task. Nevertheless, there is still a gap with respect to validating PIPs in terms of their actual business value for a specific organization. Based on empirical research and experience from consulting projects, this paper proposes a method to tackle this challenge. Our approach towards a-priori validation of process improvement patterns considers real-world constraints such as the role of senior stakeholders and opportunities such as process mining techniques. In the sense of an experience report, our approach as well as results are illustrated on the basis of a real-world business process from human resources management, covering a transactional volume of about 29,000 process instances over the period of one year. Overall, our proposal enables practitioners and researchers to subject PIPs to a sound validation procedure before taking any process implementation decision

Diagnosing Business Processes

Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología TIN2015-63502-C3-2-