Designing a Process Mining-Enabled Decision Support System for Business Process Standardization in ERP Implementation Projects

Process standardization allows to optimize ERP systems and is a nec-essary step prior to ERP implementation projects. Traditional approaches to standardizing business processes are based on manually created "de-jure" process models, which are distorted, error-prone, simplistic, and often deviating from process reality. Theoretically embedded in the organizational contingency theory as kernel theory, this paper employs a design science approach to design a process mining-enabled decision support system (DSS) which combines bottom-up process mining models with manually added top-down standardization infor-mation to recommend a suitable standard process specification from a repository. Extended process models of the as-is process are matched against a repository of best-practice standard process model using an attributebased process similarity matching algorithm. Thus, the DSS aims to reduce the overall costs of process standardization, to optimize the degree of fit between the organization and the implemented processes, and to minimize the degree of organizational change re-quired in standardization and ERP implementation projects. This paper imple-ments a working prototype instantiation in the open-source process analytics platform Apromore based on a real-life event log and standardization attributes for the Purchase-to-Pay and Order-to-Cash processes from three SAP R/3 ERP systems at the industry partner

Assessment of the Main Criticalities in the Automotive Battery Supply Chain: A Professionals’ Perspective

The environmental transition has become a crucial element in the European Commission agenda. In this context, a key role is play by the electrification of the mobility that is viewed as a feasible alternative respect to the traditional fossil fuel paradigm, due to significant energy benefits. However, the scarcity availability of raw materials for producing battery packs and their concentration in few specific areas of the world, is determining high level of uncertainties and vulnerability in the supply chains of European car manufacturers. In particular, they are heavily facing the challenges that this transition is posing, specifically considering the reorganization and the structure of the associated supply chain. Therefore, this paper aims at capturing the perspectives of automotive industry about the different stages of the battery supply chain in the electric vehicle market. To this end, a questionnaire survey has been administrated to a set of identified automotive professionals. The obtained results underline that procurement, production and recycling of batteries are the most critical steps. On the contrary, the transport and the storage of the batteries are seen less crucial. This research is intended to stimulate future studies on innovative supply chains able to better manage batteries, and it is aimed at supporting car producers on designing more accurately their supply chain and to support decision makers in more effectively develop policy in the field of the electric mobility transition

A Systematic Review of Sustainable Supply Chain Management Practices in Food Industry

The food industry is central to human beings and heavily impacts the lives of the entire society. Nowadays, the sustainable development goal and the introduction of new information and communication technologies has led food companies to deal with this new paradigm. They require sustainable practices that have the dual objective of improving the overall performance of the company itself and fulfilling the sustainability requirement. Research works on sustainable supply chain management practices in the food industry is quite fragmented, as it often considers just a part of the chain. Therefore, through a systematic literature review, this paper aims to provide an up-to-date analysis of supply chain management practices within the scope of sustainability, studying the findings of 224 reviewed papers. The implications of this work are relevant for academic research as they enlarge the body of knowledge and highlight key points where there is the need to investigate further. From a practical point of view this study proposes an overview of the most common and adopted practices that can be implemented in order to achieve sustainable development in the food industry

Industrialization and Manufacturing Steps within the Global Product Lifecycle Context

International audienceThis paper presents and discusses an analysis of the industrialization and production steps within the Product Life cycle Management (PLM) context. Initially, PLM was focused almost exclusively on the product design, but nowadays, it tends to cover all the steps of the product life cycle. In the same time, the industrialization and the production are not sufficiently integrated into the PLM solutions. Currently, there is much to be gained by extending the coverage of PLM to production step. This coverage depends on several features (for instance the frequency of product data modification). It also leads to an information exchange then to a classification of this information into categories. The main purpose of this paper is to study how to extend the PLM coverage of the life cycle steps by defining a mapping among information categories and the Information Systems (IS), which manages product manufacturing, for each feature

Method Chunks for Interoperability

Abstract. Interoperability is a key property of enterprise applications, which is hard to achieve due to the large number of interoperating components and semantic heterogeneity. Platform-based approaches such as service-oriented architectures address the technical integration of systems. However, a deep integration needs to cover the whole lifecycle of the interoperable system. We propose method engineering as a means for encoding situated knowledge about achieving interoperability in the form of method chunks. We analysed the field of interoperability for enterprise applications and propose that a tool modelling the business- and ICT-related choices in the form of method chunks is needed for a knowledge-based solution of interoperability problems. An industrial case is included to back our claims.