Detecting Structure In Chaos: A Customer Process Analysis Method

Detecting typical patterns in customer processes is the precondition for gaining an understanding about customer issues and needs in the course of performing their processes. Such insights can be translated into customer-centric service offerings that provide added value by enabling customers to reach their process objectives more effectively and rapidly, and with less effort. However, customer processes performed in less restrictive environments are extremely heterogeneous, which makes them difficult to analyse. Current approaches deal with this issue by considering customer processes in large scope and low detail, or vice versa. However, both views are required to understand customer processes comprehensively. Therefore, we present a novel customer process analysis method capable of detecting the hidden activity-cluster structure of customer processes. Consequently, both the detailed level of process activities and the aggregated cluster level are available for customer process analysis, which increases the chances of detecting patterns in these heterogeneous processes. We apply the method to two datasets and evaluate the results’ validity and utility. Moreover, we demonstrate that the method outperforms alternative solution technologies. Finally, we provide new insights into customer process theory

Porous low-loss silica–PMMA dielectric nanocomposite for high-frequency bullet lens applications

Abstract Several devices of the future generation wireless telecommunication technologies that use bands in THz frequencies for data transmission need low-loss and low-permittivity materials to enable ideal conditions for the propagation of electromagnetic waves. Herein, a lightweight dielectric bullet-shaped lens operating in the frequency range of 110–170 GHz is demonstrated to collimate electromagnetic waves, thus increasing the intensity of the electric field. The material of the lens is based on a composite of silica nanoshells and poly(methylmethacrylate) made by the impregnation of the nanoshells with the polymer followed by hot pressing in a mold. As the polymer acts only as an adhesive between the hollow nanospheres without filling the inner cavity of the shells and their interparticle spaces, the composite is highly porous (67%) and has low dielectric permittivity and loss tangent (1.5 and 4 × 10⁻³, respectively, below 200 GHz). The size of the collimated beam and the increase of the corresponding field strength are measured to vary from 2.2 to 1.2 mm and from 17.2 to 8.98 dB depending on the frequency of the waves (110–170 GHz)