10,816 research outputs found
Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns
Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse
Proceedings of the Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference (SPARC) 2011
These proceedings bring together a selection of papers from the 2011 Salford Postgraduate Annual Research Conference(SPARC). It includes papers from PhD students in the arts and social sciences, business, computing, science and engineering, education, environment, built environment and health sciences. Contributions from Salford researchers are published here alongside papers from students at the Universities of Anglia Ruskin, Birmingham City, Chester,De Montfort, Exeter, Leeds, Liverpool, Liverpool John Moores and Manchester
Dissemination of Health Information within Social Networks
In this paper, we investigate, how information about a common food born
health hazard, known as Campylobacter, spreads once it was delivered to a
random sample of individuals in France. The central question addressed here is
how individual characteristics and the various aspects of social network
influence the spread of information. A key claim of our paper is that
information diffusion processes occur in a patterned network of social ties of
heterogeneous actors. Our percolation models show that the characteristics of
the recipients of the information matter as much if not more than the
characteristics of the sender of the information in deciding whether the
information will be transmitted through a particular tie. We also found that at
least for this particular advisory, it is not the perceived need of the
recipients for the information that matters but their general interest in the
topic
Patterns of stent purchasing in a collaborative procurement organisation
Leveraging purchasing power through collaborative purchasing arrangements is
widely used to deliver efficiency savings in public procurement. The success of such
arrangements requires the purchasing behaviours of individual members of the
collaborative organisation to change in order to realise the benefits of lower prices.
However the actual purchasing behaviours of organisations within a collaborative
purchasing arrangement have not been widely researched.
The research uses a stationary stochastic model of buyer behaviour, the NBDDirichlet,
to describe and predict the purchasing behaviours of buyers of coronary and
ureteral stents in a collaborative purchasing organisation in the English National
Health Service. The three year analysis period is a period of major change for each
category, the result of supplier promotional activity in the ureteral stent case and
purchasing management activity in the case of the coronary stents.
Deviations between the observed patterns of behaviour and the model predictions
point to violations of the basic Dirichlet requirements of stationary markets and lack
of partitioning. In both the ureteral and coronary stent cases the research identifies a
segment of frequent purchasers whose behaviour differs from the rest of the
population. The impact of framework agreements in restricting the purchasing
repertoire of buyers is also identified as a deviation from typical purchasing patterns.
Both interventions result in changes to established loyalty patterns, whereby the initial
high observed levels of loyalty towards particular suppliers are replaced by a greater
willingness to purchase from alternative suppliers. The data analysis also provides
preliminary evidence for purchase deceleration as buyers defer purchases during a
negotiation period in anticipation of improved pricing
A First Approach on Modelling Staff Proactiveness in Retail Simulation Models
There has been a noticeable shift in the relative composition of the industry in the developed countries in recent years; manufacturing is decreasing while the service sector is becoming more important. However, currently most simulation models for investigating service systems are still built in the same way as manufacturing simulation models, using a process-oriented world view, i.e. they model the flow of passive entities through a system. These kinds of models allow studying aspects of operational management but are not well suited for studying the dynamics that appear in service systems due to human behaviour. For these kinds of studies we require tools that allow modelling the system and entities using an object-oriented world view, where intelligent objects serve as abstract \'actors\' that are goal directed and can behave proactively. In our work we combine process-oriented discrete event simulation modelling and object-oriented agent based simulation modelling to investigate the impact of people management practices on retail productivity. In this paper, we reveal in a series of experiments what impact considering proactivity can have on the output accuracy of simulation models of human centric systems. The model and data we use for this investigation are based on a case study in a UK department store. We show that considering proactivity positively influences the validity of these kinds of models and therefore allows analysts to make better recommendations regarding strategies to apply people management practices.Retail Performance, Management Practices, Proactive Behaviour, Service Experience, Agent-Based Modelling, Simulation
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