157 research outputs found
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
Extraction and characterization of chitin and chitosan from crustacean by-products: Biological and physicochemical properties
Chitin has been extracted from two Tunisian crustacean species. The obtained chitin was transformed into the more useful soluble chitosan. These products were characterized by their biological activity as antimicrobial and antifungal properties. The tested bacterial strains were Escherichia coli American Type Cell Culture (ATCC) 25922, Pseudomonas aeruginosa ATCC 27950 and Staphylococcus aureus ATCC 25923. Four fungi strains were also tested Candida glabrata, Candida albicans, Candidaparapsilensis and Candida kreusei. Squilla chitosan showed a minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) against the different fungi exceptionally for C. kreusei. Their antioxidant activity was investigated with 2,2-diphenyl-1-picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) radical scavenging activity and inhibition of linoleic acid peroxidation. Parapenaeus longirostris Chitosan showed the highest radical scavenging properties. Chitin and chitosan produced were also characterized with Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR).Key words: Antibacterial, antifungal, antioxidant, chitin, chitosan, crustacean
BPR Implementation: A Decision-Making Strategy
To support the efficient appraisal and selection of available best practices, this paper proposes a strategy for the implementation of Business Process Redesign (BPR). Its backbone is formed by the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) multi-criteria method and our earlier research on the popularity and impact of redesign best practices. Using (AHP) we derive a classification of most suitable best practices for the process being redesigned. Criteria such as the popularity, the impact, the goals and the risks of BPR implementation are taken into account. A case study of a municipality in the Netherlands is included. It discusses which best practices should be applied to redesign the invoicing process at the municipality. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006
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
Trade-Offs in the Performance of Workflows – Quantifying the Impact of 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
Combined anti-AGEs and antioxidant activities of different solvent extracts of Solanum elaeagnifolium Cav. (Solanaceae) fruits during ripening and related to their phytochemical compositions
Oxidative stress and advanced glycation end products (AGEs) are known as key factors for the development of diabetic complications such as retinopathy, cataract as well as atherosclerosis and neurodegenerative diseases, including Alzheimer’s diseases. In this context, natural products have been previously identified as promising sources for antioxidant and anti-glycation compounds. The current study focuses on the evaluation of antioxidant and glycation inhibitory activities of different solvent extracts of Solanum elaeagnifolium Cav (Solanaceae) fruits at different ripening stages. The results showed that antioxidant and anti-AGEs activities were significantly influenced by solvents polarities and ripening stages of S. elaeagnifolium Cav. With one exception, methanolic extract of overripe S. elaeagnifolium Cav fruit showed important protective effects against cellular oxidative stress. The aqueous extract showed the highest ABTS+ scavenging ability. Principal component analysis showed that total phenolic and flavonoid contents correlated well with observed antioxidants and anti-glycation activities. These results bring attention to the possible use of S. elaeagnifolium Cav as a valuable source of bioactive compounds exhibiting antioxidant effects and potentially alleviating diabetic complications
Phenotyping indigenous Tunisian sheep breeds for gastro-intestinal parasite resistance with a special reference to Haemonchus contortus
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
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