Personal BPM - Bringing the power of Business Process Management to the user

External and internal factors force companies to be flexible in their business processes. However, the information systems used in the companies are often too complex and the implemented process models are too rigid to quickly adopt changing determining conditions. This leads to a loss of efficiency since various tasks that would be suitable for the execution by workflow management systems must be performed manually. The presented approach for a solution solves this problem by offering a method to exploit the automation potential by using suitable flexible tools and a target-group oriented procedure model. Compared to existing approaches this method does not try to solve the problem on a company level. Instead the focus is on the individual employee who will be enabled to improve his personal workflows

Business Process Management Education in Academia: Status, challenges, and Recommendations

In response to the growing proliferation of Business Process Management (BPM) in industry and the demand this creates for BPM expertise, universities across the globe are at various stages of incorporating knowledge and skills in their teaching offerings. However, there are still only a handful of institutions that offer specialized education in BPM in a systematic and in-depth manner. This article is based on a global educators’ panel discussion held at the 2009 European Conference on Information Systems in Verona, Italy. The article presents the BPM programs of five universities from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America, describing the BPM content covered, program and course structures, and challenges and lessons learned. The article also provides a comparative content analysis of BPM education programs illustrating a heterogeneous view of BPM. The examples presented demonstrate how different courses and programs can be developed to meet the educational goals of a university department, program, or school. This article contributes insights on how best to continuously sustain and reshape BPM education to ensure it remains dynamic, responsive, and sustainable in light of the evolving and ever-changing marketplace demands for BPM expertise

ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history

The Impact of Social Business Process Management on Policy-making in e-Government

The combination of social media and Business Process Management (BPM) has given rise to the emerging field of “social BPM”. The new devel-opment of social BPM is expected to provide bene-fits like flexibility for knowledge-intensive pro-cesses, like policy-making. The goal of this paper is to understand the impact of social BPM on poli-cy-making. We first present a literature survey showing that social BPM is a new and emerging research area and limited attention has been giv-en to social BPM in e-government. The literature reviews showed a lack of empirical research into the accomplished benefits of social BPM. To bridge this gap, a comprehensive case study in a Dutch government social BPM platform was con-ducted. While not all the benefits suggested in the literature were identified in the case study, nega-tive impact of social BPM were also found. A ten-sion was found between accomplishing flexibility and accountability and user efficiency

Consulting report - Tecport Latin America

Tecport América Latina es un distribuidor regional de maquinaria portuaria con presencia actual en Perú y Brasil. Tecport es un grupo joven de empresas, que intenta ganar cuota de mercado en una industria madura con guerra de precios. Internamente, el grupo cuenta con recursos humanos limitados ubicados en diferentes países, con diferencia culturales y de zona horaria. Además, existe una alta vulnerabilidad debido a que el negocio depende de un acuerdo exclusivo con un productor italiano de maquinaria. La organización está aperturando una nueva sede en Chile, que está comenzando sus operaciones muy pronto. Al hacerlo, un problema de la transferencia y gestión de conocimientos entre oficinas se hizo evidente. La solución a este problema sería determinar la forma en que el conocimiento puede ser transferido eficientemente; de tal manera que los procesos del negocio sean más productivos y sostenibles en el tiempo. Las técnicas aplicadas para la resolución de problemas son design thinking, estrategia basada en el cliente, y estrategia de ventas a largo plazo. Para decidir la major solución, se elaboró una matriz con mediciones de impactos en la calidad, el costo y el tiempo, y los riesgos asociados. La solución propuesta es establecer un programa de gestión de procesos empresariales, que tiene como objetivo conectar la cadena de suministro y la gestión con el cliente; a través de la optimización de los procesos. Esto le permite a Tecport LA alcanzar inteligencia empresarial estratégica en el largo plazo. En el corto plazo, los administradores son capaces de supervisar y controlar toda la organización. El plan de implementación involucrará a los empleados clave en la organización desde la etapa de diseño, para garantizar su compromiso basado en responsabilidad propia. Estas actividades tienen por objeto no sólo preparar a la empresa para utilizar la solución propuesta, sino también para analizar los indicadores clave de rendimiento, que evaluarán la eficiencia de los empleados que utilizan esta herramientaTecport Latin America is a regional distributor of port machinery with current presence in Peru and Brazil. Tecport is a young group of companies attempting to gain market share in a mature industry with price war. Internally, the group has limited human resources placed in different countries with cultural and time zones differences. Apart from that, there is a high vulnerability because its business depends on an exclusive agreement with one Italian producer of machinery. The organization is opening a new subsidiary in Chile, which is starting its operations very soon. When doing so, a problem of knowledge transfer and management between offices became apparent. The solution to this problem would be to determine a way in which knowledge could be transferred in an effective way that would make business processes more productive and sustainable in time. The techniques applied for the problem solving are design thinking, customer-based strategy, and the long-term sales strategy. To support the decision of the most effective solution to propose, a matrix was developed measuring impacts in quality, cost and time, and associated risks. The proposed solution is to establish a Business Process Management program, which aims to connect Supply Chain and Client Relationship Management, through the optimization of processes. It allows Tecport LA to achieve strategic business intelligence in the long term. In the short term, managers are able to better control and oversee the entire organization. The implementation plan will involve the key employees in the organization since the design stage to guarantee their commitment based on own responsibility. These activities are intended to not only prepare the company to use the proposed solution, but also to analyze key performance indicators, expected to evaluate the efficiency of the employees using this toolTesi

Improvement of the portuguese breast cancer screening through process modelling (BPM)

Dissertation presented as the partial requirement for obtaining a Master's degree in Information Management, specialization in Knowledge Management and Business IntelligenceBreast cancer is a malignant epithelial neoplasm with high incidence and mortality in women. Focusing the clinical performance on screening processes has proven to be the way to improve morbidity and mortality statistics of this recognized public health problem. Business process management (BPM) is a management field that improves and analyzes business processes according to organizations’ strategies. BPM may help manage patient and information flow, improving waiting time in healthcare delivery while integrating healthcare processes with IT. The early diagnosis of breast cancer is of great importance since it will enable more conservative treatments and a longer disease-free survival. Organized oncology screenings programs, with all elements properly prepared, revealed to be more efficient than the opportunistic screenings. The aim of this study is to identify and model BPM processes for the healthcare sector, namely, for the breast cancer screening in Portugal. To achieve this goal, the main processes were identified and new frameworks were proposed and validated through individual interviews with experts. In this study was concluded that BPM techniques can be applied to the healthcare. Through the application of these techniques it was possible to identify the main issues within the organized breast cancer screening and suggest changes to it. These changes focus on reducing the time of the process, improving its efficiency and offering greater support to the health user

Network e-Volution

Modern society is a network society permeated by information technology (IT). As a result of innovations in IT, enormous amounts of information can be communicated to a larger number of recipients faster than ever before. The evolution of networks is heavily influenced by the extensive use of IT, which has enabled co-evolving advanced quantitative and qualitative forms of networking. Although several networks have been formed with the aim to reduce or deal with uncertainty through faster and broader access to information, it is in fact IT that has created new kinds of uncertainty. For instance, although digital information integration in supply chains has made production planning more robust, it has at the same time intensified mutual dependencies, thereby actually increasing the level of uncertainty. The aim of this working paper is to investigate the aspects of evolving networks and uncertainty in networks at the cutting edges of different types of networks and from the perspective of different layers defining these networks

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