Best practices in business process redesign: Use and impact

Purpose - This paper seeks to provide business process redesign (BPR) practitioners and academics with insight into the most popular heuristics to derive improved process designs. Design/methodology/approach - An online survey was carried out in the years 2003-2004 among a wide range of experienced BPR practitioners in the UK and The Netherlands. Findings - The survey indicates that this top ten of best practices is indeed extensively used in practice. Moreover, indications for their business impact have been collected and classified. Research limitations/implications - The authors\u27 estimations of best practices effectiveness differed from feedback obtained from respondents, possibly caused by the design of the survey instrument. This is food for further research. Practical implications - The presented framework can be used by practitioners to keep the various aspects of a redesign in perspective. The presented list of BPR best practices is directly applicable to derive new process designs. Originality/value - This paper addresses the subject of process redesign, rather than the more popular subject of process reengineering. As such, it fills in part an existing gap in knowledge. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Best practices in business process redesign: Use and impact

Purpose - This paper seeks to provide business process redesign (BPR) practitioners and academics with insight into the most popular heuristics to derive improved process designs. Design/methodology/approach - An online survey was carried out in the years 2003-2004 among a wide range of experienced BPR practitioners in the UK and The Netherlands. Findings - The survey indicates that this top ten of best practices is indeed extensively used in practice. Moreover, indications for their business impact have been collected and classified. Research limitations/implications - The authors\u27 estimations of best practices effectiveness differed from feedback obtained from respondents, possibly caused by the design of the survey instrument. This is food for further research. Practical implications - The presented framework can be used by practitioners to keep the various aspects of a redesign in perspective. The presented list of BPR best practices is directly applicable to derive new process designs. Originality/value - This paper addresses the subject of process redesign, rather than the more popular subject of process reengineering. As such, it fills in part an existing gap in knowledge. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Evaluation de la tenue du partogramme dans une maternité universitaire

Introduction: La mortalité maternelle est un problème majeur de santé mondiale. Une grande proportion de ces décès serait évitable par des soins adéquats, une aide à l'accouchement, la disponibilité des soins d'urgence et l'utilisation des outils d'aide à la décision tels que le partogramme. L'objectif était d'évaluer l'écart entre ce qui est censé être fait et ce qui est fait réellement pour les différents paramètres situés dans le partogramme au sein d'une maternité de 3ème niveau et élaborer des recommandations pour la mise en place d'un plan d'action. Méthodes: Il s'agit d'une étude descriptive rétrospective par audit clinique, effectuée sur un échantillon de 400 dossiers obstétricaux des parturientes ayant accouchées dans la maternité du CHU Farhat Hached durant l'année 2011. Le référentiel utilisé est celui réalisé par l'Agence Nationale d'Accréditation et d'Evaluation en Santé en l'an 2000, concernant la qualité de la tenue du partogramme. Résultats: La majorité des critères d'évaluation portant sur la présentation du partogramme était conforme. Deux critères concernant la variété de la présentation et le rythme cardiaque foetal étaient non conformes parmi ceux portant sur la surveillance du foetus. Plusieurs critères en rapport avec la surveillance de la mère étaient non conformes. Aucun des critères portant sur les traitements administrés et les marqueurs d'évènements n'est conforme. Les critères portant sur la naissance et la surveillance immédiate qui étaient non conformes sont : le début des efforts expulsifs, le mode d'accouchement, l'état du périnée, la délivrance et la révision utérine. Conclusion: La véritable démarche de l'audit clinique se doit d'aller au-delà du recueil et de l'analyse des données, le but final étant l'amélioration des pratiques

A combined approach to assessing the conservation status of Cap des Trois Fourches as a potential MPA: is there a shortage of MPAs in the Southern Mediterranean?

The Mediterranean basin is recognized as one of the most diverse regions on the planet, but is being threatened by overexploitation and habitat loss. Furthermore, the Strait of Gibraltar and adjacent Alboran Sea have been identified as representing an important habitat for many threatened or endangered species. In this context, one vehicle for marine conservation is the creation of marine protected sites, although Mediterranean Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) are neither large nor representative enough to form an effective network of protection. An inventory of the benthic communities and habitats of conservation interest has been carried out in Cap des Trois Fourches, an ecological and biogeographical site of interest. Univariate and multivariate analyses showed differences for marine communities among habitats and localities, indicating a great diversity in marine assemblages but an absence of a spatial gradient in marine α-diversity. The Trois Fourches area showed a high environmental quality and hosted several endangered species. Habitats of conservation concern, such as marine caves, seagrass meadows and coralligenous assemblages, were detected and studied. The scientific data recorded provide sound support for the establishment of a new MPA in Trois Fourches, taking into account that the findings match the scientific criteria required for declaration as a protected area. The benefits for connectivity at the Mediterranean scale and the local economy are discussed

Trade-offs in the performance of workflows - quantifying the impact of best practices

Business process redesign is one of the most powerful ways to boost business performance and to improve customer satisfaction [14]. A possible approach to business process redesign is using redesign best practices. A previous study identified a set of 29 different redesign best practices [18]. However, little is known about the exact impact of these redesign best practices on workflow performance. This study proposes an approach that can be used to quantify the impact of a business process redesign project on all dimensions of workflow performance. The approach consists of a large set of performance measures and a simulation toolkit. It supports the quantification of the impact of the implementation of redesign best practices, in order to determine what best practice or combination of best practices leads to the most favorable effect in a specific business process. The approach is developed based on a quantification project for the parallel best practice [8] and is validated with two other quantification projects, namely for the knockout and triage best practices

BPR best practices for the healthcare domain

Healthcare providers are under pressure to work more efficiently and in a more patient-focused way. One possible way to achieve this is to launch Business Process Redesign (BPR) initiatives, which focus on changing the structure of the involved processes and using IT as an enabler for such changes. In this paper, we argue that a list of historically successful improvement tactics, the BPR best practices, are a highly suitable ingredient for such efforts in the healthcare domain. Our assessment is based on the analysis of 14 case studies. The insights obtained by the analysis also led to an extension of the original set of best practices

Partitioning clustering algorithms for protein sequence data sets

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Genome-sequencing projects are currently producing an enormous amount of new sequences and cause the rapid increasing of protein sequence databases. The unsupervised classification of these data into functional groups or families, clustering, has become one of the principal research objectives in structural and functional genomics. Computer programs to automatically and accurately classify sequences into families become a necessity. A significant number of methods have addressed the clustering of protein sequences and most of them can be categorized in three major groups: hierarchical, graph-based and partitioning methods. Among the various sequence clustering methods in literature, hierarchical and graph-based approaches have been widely used. Although partitioning clustering techniques are extremely used in other fields, few applications have been found in the field of protein sequence clustering. It is not fully demonstrated if partitioning methods can be applied to protein sequence data and if these methods can be efficient compared to the published clustering methods.</p> <p>Methods</p> <p>We developed four partitioning clustering approaches using Smith-Waterman local-alignment algorithm to determine pair-wise similarities of sequences. Four different sets of protein sequences were used as evaluation data sets for the proposed methods.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We show that these methods outperform several other published clustering methods in terms of correctly predicting a classifier and especially in terms of the correctness of the provided prediction. The software is available to academic users from the authors upon request.</p

KSHV gB associated RGD interactions promote attachment of cells by inhibiting the potential migratory signals induced by the disintegrin-like domain

Background: Kaposi's sarcoma-associated herpesvirus (KSHV) glycoprotein B (gB) is not only expressed on the envelope of mature virions but also on the surfaces of cells undergoing lytic replication. Among herpesviruses, KSHV gB is the only glycoprotein known to possess the RGD (Arg-Gly-Asp) binding integrin domain critical to mediating cell attachment. Recent studies described gB to also possess a disintegrin-like domain (DLD) said to interact with non-RGD binding integrins. We wanted to decipher the roles of two individually distinct integrin binding domains (RGD versus DLD) within KSHV gB in regulating attachment of cells over cell migration