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

Configurable Process Models as a Basis for Reference Modeling

Off-the-shelf packages such as SAP need to be configured to suit the requirements of an organization. Reference models support the configuration of these systems. Existing reference models use rather traditional languages. For example, the SAP reference model uses Eventdriven Process Chains (EPCs). Unfortunately, traditional languages like EPCs do not capture the configuration-aspects well. Consider for example the concept of "choice" in the control-flow perspective. Although any process modeling language, including EPCs, offers a choice construct (e.g., the XOR connector in EPCs), a single construct will not be able to capture the time dimension, scope, and impact of a decision. Some decisions are taken at run-time for a single case while other decisions are taken at build-time impacting a whole organization and all current and future cases. This position paper discusses the need for configurable process models as a basic building block for reference modeling. The focus is on the control-flow perspective. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006

RALph: A Graphical Notation for Resource Assignments in Business Processes

The business process (BP) resource perspective deals with the management of human as well as non-human resources throughout the process lifecycle. Although it has received increasing attention recently, there exists no graphical notation for it up until now that is both expressive enough to cover well-known resource selection conditions and independent of the BP modelling language. In this paper, we introduce RALph, a graphical notation for the assignment of human resources to BP activities. We define its semantics by mapping this notation to a language that has been formally defined in description logics, which enables its automated analysis. Although we show how RALph can be seamlessly integrated with BPMN, it is noteworthy that the notation is independent of the BP modelling language. Altogether, RALph will foster the visual modelling of the resource perspective in BP

A SOA-based architecture framework

We present an Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)– based architecture framework. The architecture framework is designed to be close to industry standards, especially to the Service Component Architecture (SCA). The framework is language independent and the building blocks of each system, activities and data, are first class citizens. We present a meta model of the architecture framework and discuss its concepts in detail. Through the framework, concepts of an SOA such as wiring, correlation and instantiation can be clarifie

Enhancing workflow-nets with data for trace completion

The growing adoption of IT-systems for modeling and executing (business) processes or services has thrust the scientific investigation towards techniques and tools which support more complex forms of process analysis. Many of them, such as conformance checking, process alignment, mining and enhancement, rely on complete observation of past (tracked and logged) executions. In many real cases, however, the lack of human or IT-support on all the steps of process execution, as well as information hiding and abstraction of model and data, result in incomplete log information of both data and activities. This paper tackles the issue of automatically repairing traces with missing information by notably considering not only activities but also data manipulated by them. Our technique recasts such a problem in a reachability problem and provides an encoding in an action language which allows to virtually use any state-of-the-art planning to return solutions

The 4C spectrum of fundamental behavioral relations for concurrent systems

The design of concurrent software systems, in particular process-aware information systems, involves behavioral modeling at various stages. Recently, approaches to behavioral analysis of such systems have been based on declarative abstractions defined as sets of behavioral relations. However, these relations are typically defined in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we address the lack of a systematic exploration of the fundamental relations that can be used to capture the behavior of concurrent systems, i.e., co-occurrence, conflict, causality, and concurrency. Besides the definition of the spectrum of behavioral relations, which we refer to as the 4C spectrum, we also show that our relations give rise to implication lattices. We further provide operationalizations of the proposed relations, starting by proposing techniques for computing relations in unlabeled systems, which are then lifted to become applicable in the context of labeled systems, i.e., systems in which state transitions have semantic annotations. Finally, we report on experimental results on efficiency of the proposed computations

Formal semantics and analysis of control flow in WS-BPEL

Web service composition refers to the creation of new (Web) services by combination of functionality provided by existing ones. This paradigm has gained significant attention in the Web services community and is seen as a pillar for building service-oriented applications. A number of domain-specific languages for service composition have been proposed with consensus being formed around a process-oriented language known as WS-BPEL (or BPEL). The kernel of BPEL consists of simple communication primitives that may be combined using control-flow constructs expressing sequence, branching, parallelism, synchronisation, etc. As a result, BPEL process definitions lend themselves to static flow-based analysis techniques. In this report, we describe a tool that performs two useful types of static checks and extracts meta-data to optimise dynamic resource management. The tool operates by translating BPEL processes into Petri nets and exploiting existing Petri net analysis techniques. It relies on a comprehensive and rigorously defined mapping of BPEL constructs into Petri net structures

Die Politische Ökonomie Beruflicher Weiterbildung: Der Einfluss von Tarifverträgen auf Arbeitgeberinvestitionen und Teilnahmequoten

Warum sind aber Arbeitgeber in einigen Ländern bereit, sich an Weiterbildungsmaßnahmen ihrer Mitarbeiter zu beteiligen, während dies in anderen Ländern nicht der Fall ist? In diesem Artikel wird die tarifvertragliche Abdeckung als zentraler Mechanismus hierfür herausgearbeitet: Einerseits intendiert, durch vertraglich geregelte Weiterbildungsmaßnahmen, und anderseits unintendiert, durch die Angleichung von Löhnen zwischen Firmen. Mithilfe von Mehrebenenregressionsanalysen auf Basis von Daten des European Social Survey kann gezeigt werden, dass Tarifverträge einen postiven Effekt auf die Finanzierungsbeteiligung von Arbeitgebern haben, sowie auf individuelle Teilnahmen. Diese Ergebnisse legen nahe, dass institutionelle Faktoren gewichtige Einflussgrößen in Erklärungen von Firmeninvestitionen und Weiterbildungsbeteiligung sind. In einer abschließenden Diskussion werden diese Funde im Kontext der internationalen Debatte um die Dezentralisierung korporatistischer Arrangements besprochen.Why are employers in some countries willing to pay for further training of their employees, but not in other countries. In this article, it is argued that the central mechanism for this is collective bargaining coverage. On the one hand, intentionally through contractual regulations regarding further training. On the other hand, unintentionally through equalization of wages between companies. Using multilevel-regression based on data from the European Social Survey, results indicate a positive effect of collective bargaining coverage on employer’s willingness to pay for further training, as well as on participation in further training. These results suggest institutions are significant factors in explanations of firm investments into skills and further training. In a concluding discussion, findings are reviewed in the context of the international debate about decentralization of corporatist arrangements