A Socio-Instrumental Pragmatism View for Strengthening Sales Representatives Productivity in B2B Face-to-Face Sales Interaction System

This paper examined the possibility of an extension of Lind’s and Goldkuhl’s (2005) and Goldkhul (1998) conceptualization of business transaction (in terms of Business Action Theory, B.A.T.), in order to examine the value of a socio instrumental pragmatism view of communication actions for B2B face-to-face sales interaction system. Such an approach allowed us to introduce clear propositions for strengthening sales representatives’ productivity. First, it attempted to do this by categorizing 42 (forty-two) identified empirical papers of the last decade (2000-2010) into Lind’s and Goldkuhl’s assumptions for B.A.T. in order to view communication as action. These assumptions were directly and implicitly equated with the assumptions and best practices of B2B face-to-face sales interaction system. Second, the occurrence of each category was presented in three (3) sections; the paper provided some summary points and interpretive claims. The discussion section assessed the extent to which these points and claims have addressed the stated aim of the paper, it reviewed whether the claims were unique in relation to existing literature and explored some implications and future possibilities

Hybrid method to assist business process reengineering in developing countries

Public institution spending in developing countries is constantly increasing in the last decades, and the available data shows that there is a lack of efficiency in resource consumption not reflected in efficiency improvement. This necessitates the need to reengineer business process that will increase efficiency at a lower cost. To address this, the researcher employed interview and observation data collection strategy where 50 employees from the central registration team of Yobe State University and 22 Health practitioners including doctors, nurses and radiologists from Sani Abatcha Specialist Hospital, Damaturu-Nigeria were interviewed and observed respectively. In this research, the approach based on design science that integrates Knowledge Map, Enterprise Ontology and lean using approach to find unnecessary transactions that must be reengineered to improve the organizational efficiency was adopted. This approach was chosen as a basis for finding a solution because it provides a better understanding of the dynamics of an organization, and allows a good alignment between the enterprise design and operation. Demonstrations of the processes collected from Yobe State University and Radiology Department of Sani Abatcha Specialist Hospital, Damaturu-Nigeria, making it possible to find transactions that can be refined or improved. Evaluation was carried out by means of descriptions and the Four Principles from Österle. Findings indicated that the number of transactions were reduced by 25% in the case of Yobe State University registration process and also reduced by 41.7% in the case of Radiology Department of Sani Abatcha Specialist Hospital. In conclusion, the results proved that the approach yields an adequate and clear process view and is reliable when it comes to reengineering organizational operational processes

A genetic programming based business process mining approach

As business processes become ever more complex there is a need for companies to understand the processes they already have in place. To undertake this manually would be time consuming. The practice of process mining attempts to automatically construct the correct representation of a process based on a set of process execution logs. The aim of this research is to develop a genetic programming based approach for business process mining. The focus of this research is on automated/semi automated business processes within the service industry (by semi automated it is meant that part of the process is manual and likely to be paper based). This is the first time a GP approach has been used in the practice of process mining. The graph based representation and fitness parsing used are also unique to the GP approach. A literature review and an industry survey have been undertaken as part of this research to establish the state-of-the-art in the research and practice of business process modelling and mining. It is observed that process execution logs exist in most service sector companies are not utilised for process mining. The development of a new GP approach is documented along with a set of modifications required to enable accuracy in the mining of complex process constructs, semantics and noisy process execution logs. In the context of process mining accuracy refers to the ability of the mined model to reflect the contents of the event log on which it is based; neither over describing, including features that are not recorded in the log, or under describing, just including the most common features leaving out low frequency task edges, the contents of the event log. The complexity of processes, in terms of this thesis, involves the mining of parallel constructs, processes containing complex semantic constructs (And/XOR split and join points) and processes containing 20 or more tasks. The level of noise mined by the business process mining approach includes event logs which have a small number of randomly selected tasks missing from a third of their structure. A novel graph representation for use with GP in the mining of business processes is presented along with a new way of parsing graph based individuals against process execution logs. The GP process mining approach has been validated with a range of tests drawn from literature and two case studies, provided by the industrial sponsor, utilising live process data. These tests and case studies provide a range of process constructs to fully test and stretch the GP process mining approach. An outlook is given into the future development of the GP process mining approach and process mining as a practice.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo