Evaluating Business Process Improvement Patterns by Simulation

Existing approaches for business process improvement often lack systematic guidelines to transform a business process into an enhanced state, which we refer to as the “act of improvement”. To close this gap, a pattern-based approach has been designed and developed in previous works. In this paper, the usefulness of “Business Process Improvement Patterns” (BPI-Patterns) as a means of improving business processes is analyzed. For this purpose, a simulation experiment is performed in which several BPI-Patterns are applied to evaluate whether their anticipated effects can be confirmed for real-life business processes. From the analysis of the simulation results, i.e. how the application of BPI-Patterns affects the business processes, we investigate enabling as well as hindering factors that influence the implementation of BPI-Patterns. These factors may serve as a means to further specify instances of BPI-Patterns and also contribute to the overall evaluation of the BPI-Pattern approach

Quality measures for ETL processes: from goals to implementation

Extraction transformation loading (ETL) processes play an increasingly important role for the support of modern business operations. These business processes are centred around artifacts with high variability and diverse lifecycles, which correspond to key business entities. The apparent complexity of these activities has been examined through the prism of business process management, mainly focusing on functional requirements and performance optimization. However, the quality dimension has not yet been thoroughly investigated, and there is a need for a more human-centric approach to bring them closer to business-users requirements. In this paper, we take a first step towards this direction by defining a sound model for ETL process quality characteristics and quantitative measures for each characteristic, based on existing literature. Our model shows dependencies among quality characteristics and can provide the basis for subsequent analysis using goal modeling techniques. We showcase the use of goal modeling for ETL process design through a use case, where we employ the use of a goal model that includes quantitative components (i.e., indicators) for evaluation and analysis of alternative design decisions.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Evaluating concepts for short-term control in financial service processes

Financial services are characterised by the integration of customers while the service is being delivered. This integration leads to interruptions and thus delays in the processing of a customer order until for example the customer provides the missing input. Because customer behaviour can only be planned to a certain extent this is a major problem for an efficient control of financial service processes. It would be helpful to know which concept leads to the best solution for a certain situation in controlling the process. A concept contains explicit practical knowledge e.g. using a stand-by-employee or a prioritisation of customer orders with first-infirst-out. As financial services differ from manufacturing processes application knowledge of concepts cannot be transferred one to one. To test concepts regarding their ability to deal efficiently with interruptions by customers short-term simulations should be conducted. Shortterm simulation uses the actual state of a process and is not focussing on steady-state results. The research presented focuses on comparing several concepts for short-term control using case-study data of a typical financial service process. For this process a simulation model is built based on process mining. This approach is used to gather information out of documented timestamps of underlying process-aware information systems. Such timestamps allow a historical analysis to build typical scenarios and to gather the actual state of a financial service process as a starting point for a simulation analysis. The depicted concepts are simulated for different typical scenarios points to determine respectively which concept suits best. The results show which concepts suit best in certain situations for the case study conducted. --short-term control,financial services,business process simulation

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

Changing the way we learn: towards agile learning and co-operation

This paper addresses the need for learning and competence development in industrial organizations. The people that enter professional organizations today are part of a gamer generation that have some or much experience with on-line games. Therefore they are more open to e-learning and in general more open to access anything on-line. At the same time industrial organizations experience a pressure on their ability to train employees faster due to the increase in complexity. We argue that games are not yet mature enough to support this training challenge as stand alone efforts. But games can support the training and competence development in a synchronized setup with other means

Simulating Primary Manufacturing Area (PMA) activities of fixed trailing edge panels production

Simulation clearly has the potential to play an important role in manufacturing decision-making at many levels. This simulation study is conducted at the local manufacturing plant that manufactures fixed trailing edge panels for the aerospace industry. The model focused on operational activities at the primary manufacturing area of cutting and laminating of aircraft’s composite parts. The model built was used to investigate a variety of issues, for example to determine the impact of a proposed change, without affecting production.The result shows that when production rate was increased by 20% to investigate the current plant capacity, the current resources capacity was unable to tolerate this increment. From the model experimentation, an increase of 60 minutes working time for ply cutter machines and 75 minutes of lay up operators found to be the best design to meet the expected production throughput and increase resources utilisation

Identifying influencers in a social network : the value of real referral data

Individuals influence each other through social interactions and marketers aim to leverage this interpersonal influence to attract new customers. It still remains a challenge to identify those customers in a social network that have the most influence on their social connections. A common approach to the influence maximization problem is to simulate influence cascades through the network based on the existence of links in the network using diffusion models. Our study contributes to the literature by evaluating these principles using real-life referral behaviour data. A new ranking metric, called Referral Rank, is introduced that builds on the game theoretic concept of the Shapley value for assigning each individual in the network a value that reflects the likelihood of referring new customers. We also explore whether these methods can be further improved by looking beyond the one-hop neighbourhood of the influencers. Experiments on a large telecommunication data set and referral data set demonstrate that using traditional simulation based methods to identify influencers in a social network can lead to suboptimal decisions as the results overestimate actual referral cascades. We also find that looking at the influence of the two-hop neighbours of the customers improves the influence spread and product adoption. Our findings suggest that companies can take two actions to improve their decision support system for identifying influential customers: (1) improve the data by incorporating data that reflects the actual referral behaviour of the customers or (2) extend the method by looking at the influence of the connections in the two-hop neighbourhood of the customers

Aligning business processes and work practices

Current business process modeling methodologies offer little guidance regarding how to keep business process models aligned with their actual execution. This paper describes how to achieve this goal by uncovering and supervising business process models in connection with work practices using BAM. BAM is a methodology for business process modeling, supervision and improvement that works at two dimensions; the dimension of processes and the dimension of work practices. The business modeling component of BAM is illustrated with a case study in an organizational setting

A comparative analysis of business process modelling techniques

Business process modelling is an increasingly popular research area for both organisations and academia due to its usefulness in facilitating human understanding and communication. Several modelling techniques have been proposed and used to capture the characteristics of business processes. However, available techniques view business processes from different perspectives and have different features and capabilities. Furthermore, to date limited guidelines exist for selecting appropriate modelling techniques based on the characteristics of the problem and its requirements. This paper presents a comparative analysis of some popular business process modelling techniques. The comparative framework is based on five criteria: flexibility, ease of use, understandability, simulation support and scope. The study highlights some of the major paradigmatic differences between the techniques. The proposed framework can serve as the basis for evaluating further modelling techniques and generating selection procedures