Meta Modeling for Business Process Improvement

Conducting business process improvement (BPI) initiatives is a topic of high priority for today’s companies. However, performing BPI projects has become challenging. This is due to rapidly changing customer requirements and an increase of inter-organizational business processes, which need to be considered from an end-to-end perspective. In addition, traditional BPI approaches are more and more perceived as overly complex and too resource-consuming in practice. Against this background, the paper proposes a BPI roadmap, which is an approach for systematically performing BPI projects and serves practitioners’ needs for manageable BPI methods. Based on this BPI roadmap, a domain-specific conceptual modeling method (DSMM) has been developed. The DSMM supports the efficient documentation and communication of the results that emerge during the application of the roadmap. Thus, conceptual modeling acts as a means for purposefully codifying the outcomes of a BPI project. Furthermore, a corresponding software prototype has been implemented using a meta modeling platform to assess the technical feasibility of the approach. Finally, the usability of the prototype has been empirically evaluated

Investigation of non-methane hydrocarbons at a Central Adriatic marine site Mali Lošinj, Croatia

For the first time, volatile hydrocarbons were measured in Croatia, at Mali Lošinj in the period from autumn 2004 to autumn 2005. Mali Lošinj site is conveniently located as a gateway to Croatia for any potential pollution from either Po valley in Italy, or other locations in southern Europe or even Africa. The sampling was performed on multisorbent tubes and then analyzed by thermal desorption gas chromatography with a flame ionization detector. The aim was to determine and estimate the non-methane hydrocarbons in Mali Lošinj, a location with Mediterranean vegetation and species which emit large quantities of volatile organic compounds. Ozone volume fraction and meteorological parameters were also continuously measured, from April to October 2005. Ethane, ethene, ethyne, propane, propene, n-pentane, n-hexane, benzene and toluene were identified in all air samples. Benzene and toluene have been found in ambient air and significant positive correlations between ethyne and ethane, propane and propene indicate emissions from transport