VISUAL PPINOT: A Graphical Notation for Process Performance Indicators

Process performance indicators (PPIs) allow the quantitative evaluation of business processes, providing essential information for decision making. It is common practice today that business processes and PPIs are usually modelled separately using graphical notations for the former and natural language for the latter. This approach makes PPI definitions simple to read and write, but it hinders maintenance consistency between business processes and PPIs. It also requires their manual translation into lower-level implementation languages for their operationalisation, which is a time-consuming, error-prone task because of the ambiguities inherent to natural language definitions. In this article, Visual ppinot, a graphical notation for defining PPIs together with business process models, is presented. Its underlying formal metamodel allows the automated processing of PPIs. Furthermore, it improves current state-of-the-art proposals in terms of expressiveness and in terms of providing an explicit visualisation of the link between PPIs and business processes, which avoids inconsistencies and promotes their co-evolution. The reference implementation, developed as a complete tool suite, has allowed its validation in a multiple-case study, in which five dimensions of Visual ppinot were studied: expressiveness, precision, automation, understandability, and traceability

Quantification of the implementation of the parallel heuristic

This report has been written as a result of a simulation study in which the impact of the implementation of a particular redesign heuristic has been quantified. The heuristic investigated in this study is the parallel heuristic (Reijers, 2003). In order to be able to make a quantification of the impact of the implementation, a set of models has been created. These models have been simulated and the results have been analyzed and compared. Finally conclusions have been drawn, based on the results of the output analysis

Application of labels to trace material flows in multi-echelon supply chains

Current developments in society requires increasing information on products at batch level. This holds especially true for the food industry. To be able to meet such requirements, data on the origin of products are an important factor, frequently including details of production conditions in preceding echelons. This paper discusses how code numbers, batches and particularly labels in multi-echelon supply chains can be applied to manage the enormous amount of detailed data which are vital to these usually complex supply chains. The research shows that the concept of labels is much more applicable than commonly understood. First, it enables efficient aggregation of data in complex supply networks. This is important to delimit the start and end of a network and in taking dynamic changes into account. Second, labels add value to the product. In business this concept is already known, e.g. as brand (Champagne, Parma ham) or as quality characteristics (environmentally kind, animal friendly). In information systems, however, application of the concept of a label is only marginally used. This puts too much emphasis on product data at batch level and it is a missed opportunity to contribute to a sound basis for guaranteed product qualit

Business process redesign at a mental healthcare institute: a coulored petri net approach

Business Process Redesign aims to radically improve the performance of business processes. One of the approaches to derive such an improved process design is an evolutionary approach, making use of redesign heuristics (Reijers, 2003). Simulation of the redesigned business process comes into play if one has to decide whether the redesign is better than the previous process design, or if one needs to compare alternative redesigns. Usually, the characteristics of the process are such that a purely analytical performance evaluation is not feasible. This paper shows the applicability of coloured Petri nets, especially CPN Tools, in such a redesign approach. The starting point of the paper is a case study in a mental healthcare institute, which focussed on improvement of the intake process: reduction of flow time and service time. We show the initial CPN model and an alternative redesigned CPN model for the intake process and evaluate the impact on flow time and service time. In line with previous research, we conclude that coloured Petri nets are well suited to model and simulate business processes. Applying Monitors in addition to the regular CPN Tools package helped us to carry out the simulations in such a way that we were able to carry out statistical analysis, enabling us to compare the performance of different models. An important drawback of our approach is that modelling resources in a business process is quite laborious and results in complex constructions, which are hard to communicate with people who should be able to evaluate the effect of a particular redesign

Managing traceability information in manufacture

In this paper, an approach to design information systems for traceability is proposed. The paper applies gozinto graph modelling for traceability of the goods flow. A gozinto graph represents a graphical listing of raw materials, parts, intermediates and subassemblies, which a process transforms into an end product, through a sequence of operations. Next, the graphical listing has been translated into a reference data model that is the basis for designing an information system for tracking and tracing. Materials that are modelled this way represent production and/or purchase lots or batches. The composition of a certain end product is then represented through modelling all its constituent materials along with their intermediate relations. By registering all relations between sub-ordinate and super-ordinate material lots, a method of tracking the composition of the end product is obtained. When the entire sequence of operations required for manufacturing an end product adheres to this registering of relations, a multilevel bill of lots can be compiled. That bill of lots then, provides the necessary information to determine the composition of a material item out of component items. These composition data can be used to recall any items having consumed a certain component of specific interest (e.g., deficient), but also to certify product quality or to pro-actively adjust production processes to optimise the product quality in relation to its production characteristics (e.g., scarcity, costs or time). (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

Show off the corporate library

Some published evidence has suggested that corporate libraries are slowly becoming irrelevant in meeting organisational information needs due to old-fashioned models of service delivery. Elsewhere in the literature the intranet is heralded as a technological tool for corporate information management. This paper provides the results of a series of case studies completed in 1998. The purpose of the research was to investigate: (a) whether corporate libraries could be considered as heading towards demise; (b) the extent to which corporate librarians might use intranets to provide information services to their clients; (c) the level of library involvement in the planning, implementation and running of corporate intranets; (d) the perceived impact of intranet development on libraries' profiles within their parent organisations. The data were collected from library staff in eight corporate headquarters of organisations based in California, USA by observation, interview and e-mail. The results suggest that the case study libraries are heavily integrated with the corporate intranet and that the library staff are actively involved in taking the best advantage of this technology to deliver information services to meet increasing customer demands

Workflow management systems + swarm intelligence = dynamic task assignment for emergency management applications

The assignment of tasks to human performers is a critical component in people-centric business process management systems. Workflow management systems typically assign work items using strategies that only consider qualified resources. There are, however, situations, where this approach falls short. For instance, in emergency response situations, tasks need to be carried out by resources that are available immediately, even if they do not match all skill requirements. This paper compares the performance of a set of six task assignment mechanisms for workflow applications using a scenario from the emergency management domain. In particular, we develop and simulate assignment strategies inspired by stimulus/response models derived from swarm intelligence, and benchmark these strategies against conventional task assignment strategies. Our findings show that swarm intelligence-based approaches outperform the traditional assignment of tasks in ad-hoc organizations, and that workflow-based emergency management systems could benefit significantly from these novel task assignment strategies