An Interactive framework to develop and align business process models

In the past few decades, the usage of Business Process Management (BPM) has enormously increased. Organizations are devoting resources towards development and use of BPM techniques and technologies to analyze, model, improve and implement business processes. The procedures currently used for collecting information to create business process models generally lead to misunderstanding or ambiguity between model and domain experts. We propose a framework to build business process models directly from users’ inputs captured through interactive web-forms. It also allows the users to align processes with strategic business objectives, critical success factors, and key performance indicators. Further, processes can be tagged with appropriate maturity level, types and tiers. The framework includes a dashboard with real-time reports which helps decision makers to monitor organization’s performance, make better decisions, and standardize/optimize processes across the organization. A comparison of the functionality available in different tools along with proposed framework is also presented.BPMBusiness Process Managemen

Towards an agile methodology for industrial problem solving

In order to survive to the unstable and highly changing market-place, modern organisations need to adapt their business processes to be more agile. Such is, particularly, the case of problem solving processes. Problem solving is a key activity that companies perform on a daily basis to improve quality and to obtain sustainable and continuous improvement. Such processes are built following standard rigid frameworks as Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA), Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control (DMAIC), or 8 Disciplines (8D)/ 9 Steps (9S). In these methods, the generalization and reuse of knowledge is facilitated by standardization. However, it is sometimes difficult to react to unexpected events due to over-constrained standards. Then, a need arises to define a problem solving process sufficiently structured but not over constrained by standards, which can be reconfigured and adapted to unexpected situations, and that is based on experience feedback principles. This thesis work describes a proposition of an agile problem solving process driven by the reuse of experiences and knowledge. For this purpose, based on Case-Based Reasoning (CBR) principles, the complete lifecycle of an agile problem solving process is proposed. Following the five steps that compose the agile lifecycle, the agile process can be defined, executed and stored in a dedicated knowledge and experience base. An application of the model to a specific problem solving process of a surface treatment company is presented. The process is analysed, deploying the complete agile lifecycle. It is shown how the standard problem solving method used within the company could become more agile through the application of our method