Automated Planning of Process Models: The Constructions of Exclusive Choices

In our competitive world, companies need to adapt their processes quickly in order to react, for instance, to changing customer demands. Process models, as means to support process management, are nowadays often created and adapted in a time-consuming, widely used manual manner. Semantic Business Process Management in combination with planning approaches can alleviate this drawback by enabling an automated planning of process models. This paper describes the drawbacks that existing planning algorithms have related to the creation of process models. Therefore, we introduce - based on the design science paradigm - an innovative algorithm (method) that is suitable for the planning of process models focusing on the construction of the control flow pattern exclusive choice. Demonstrating the feasibility and the effectiveness of our method, we implemented our approach as a prototype. Finally, we evaluate the algorithm in terms of different properties like termination and its applicability within a real-use situation

VALUE-BASED PROCESS IMPROVEMENT

For years, “improving business processes” has been and is the primary business priority of IT. In business process management (BPM), common criteria to evaluate the improvement of a process are time, costs, customer satisfaction and output quality. In contrast, the management of companies focuses on increasing the company’s value, using a value-based management approach, which is hard to be linked to these criteria. A value-based process improvement can alleviate this drawback by incorporating value-based management into the area of BPM. In this paper we introduce, based on the design science paradigm, an approach that is suitable for the value-based improvement of processes. Demonstrating the feasibility and the advantage of our approach, we show its applicability within a real world scenario and evaluate it by comparing it to a competing work in the field of value-based process management

How to Structure Business Transformation Projects: The Case of Infineon’s Finance IT Roadmap

Although project management, benefits management, change management, and transformation management are everyday terms in many organizations, projects still experience high failure rates. Business transformation projects in particular are prone to fail because they affect multiple enterprise architecture layers, involve many stakeholders, last several years, and tie up considerable amounts of corporate capital. To handle their complexity, scholars recommend structuring business transformation projects into portfolios of interdependent, yet smaller and, thus, manageable projects. So far, little guidance on how to do so exists. To share first-hand experience and stimulate research, we present and reflect on a project conducted with Infineon Technologies in which we co-developed Infineon’s finance IT roadmap. The finance IT roadmap served as the foundation for transforming Infineon’s finance IT setup to tackle future challenges of financial management in the semiconductor industry from an integrated business, process, and IT perspective

Automated planning of process models: the construction of exclusive choices

In our competitive world, companies need to adapt their processes quickly in order to react, for instance, to changing customer demands. Process models, as means to support process management, are nowadays often created and adapted in a time-consuming, widely used manual manner. Semantic Business Process Management in combination with planning approaches can alleviate this drawback by enabling an automated planning of process models. This paper describes the drawbacks that existing planning algorithms have related to the creation of process models. Therefore, we introduce - based on the design science paradigm - an innovative algorithm (method) that is suitable for the planning of process models focusing on the construction of the control flow pattern exclusive choice. Demonstrating the feasibility and the effectiveness of our method, we implemented our approach as a prototype. Finally, we evaluate the algorithm in terms of different properties like termination and its applicability within a real-use situation

Value-Based and Automated Process Design

The main objective of this doctoral thesis is to contribute to the field of business process management (BPM) by focusing in particular on the design phase of the BPM lifecycle from (i) a business perspective as well as from (ii) an IT perspective. The design phase of the BPM lifecycle needs a clear business perspective in order for processes to be in line with the business model of a company and, thus, to support the value creation goal of a company. Therefore, the principles of value-based management are introduced into BPM, considering cash flows, risk and a long term view, for example via the net present value of processes. This shows great potential to better connect the business model of a company with its processes. Moreover, the design phase of the BPM lifecycle is typically performed in a rather manual way, although there is information technology (IT) that supports the design phase. However, this potential for IT support is not fully tapped yet. In particular for the modeling of processes, there is the potential of IT to enable a more automated process modeling, as shown within this doctoral thesis. This introduces more IT into the design phase of BPM. Thus, at the interface of the business model and processes, this doctoral thesis (i) extends the body of knowledge in the area of BPM by providing a valuation calculus for processes in order to design and improve processes in line with the value creation goal of a company. At the interface of processes and IT, this doctoral thesis (ii) extends the body of knowledge regarding the automated construction of process models

Bringing value-based business process management to the operational process level

For years, improving processes has been a prominent business priority for Chief Information Officers. As expressed by the popular saying, “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,” process measures are an important instrument for managing processes and corresponding change projects. Companies have been using a value-based management approach since the 1990s in a constant endeavor to increase their value. Value-based business process management introduces value-based management principles to business process management and uses a risk-adjusted expected net present value as the process measure. However, existing analyses of this issue operate at a high (i.e., corporate) level, hampering the use of value-based business process management at an operational process level in both research and practice. Therefore, this paper proposes a valuation calculus that brings value-based business process management to the operational process level by showing how the risk-adjusted expected net present value of a process can be determined. We demonstrate that the valuation calculus provides insights into the theoretical foundations of processes and helps improve the calculation capabilities of an existing process-modeling tool

An economic decision model for determining the appropriate level of business process standardization

Abstract Business process management (BPM) is an acknowledged source of corporate performance. A well-established element of the BPM toolbox by which organizations intend to tune the performance of their processes is business process standardization (BPS). So far, research on BPS has predominantly taken a descriptive perspective, analyzing how BPS affects different dimensions of process performance (e.g., cost, quality, time, flexibility). Only very few studies capitalize on the mature body of descriptive BPS knowledge to assist in determining an appropriate BPS level for an organization’s processes. Moreover, these studies do not resolve the BPS trade-off, i.e., the partly conflicting effects of BPS on process performance. To address this research problem, we propose a decision model that provides guidance on how to determine an economically appropriate BPS level for a business process. We thereby adopt the design science research (DSR) paradigm and draw from the body of knowledge on BPS as well as value-based management. We evaluated the decision model by discussing its design specification against theory-backed design objectives. We also validated the model’s applicability and usefulness in a real-world case where we applied the decision model and a prototypical implementation to the coverage switching processes of an insurance broker pool company. Finally, we challenged the decision model against the accepted evaluation criteria from the DSR literature