Evaluating concepts for short-term control in financial service processes

Financial services are characterised by the integration of customers while the service is being delivered. This integration leads to interruptions and thus delays in the processing of a customer order until for example the customer provides the missing input. Because customer behaviour can only be planned to a certain extent this is a major problem for an efficient control of financial service processes. It would be helpful to know which concept leads to the best solution for a certain situation in controlling the process. A concept contains explicit practical knowledge e.g. using a stand-by-employee or a prioritisation of customer orders with first-infirst-out. As financial services differ from manufacturing processes application knowledge of concepts cannot be transferred one to one. To test concepts regarding their ability to deal efficiently with interruptions by customers short-term simulations should be conducted. Shortterm simulation uses the actual state of a process and is not focussing on steady-state results. The research presented focuses on comparing several concepts for short-term control using case-study data of a typical financial service process. For this process a simulation model is built based on process mining. This approach is used to gather information out of documented timestamps of underlying process-aware information systems. Such timestamps allow a historical analysis to build typical scenarios and to gather the actual state of a financial service process as a starting point for a simulation analysis. The depicted concepts are simulated for different typical scenarios points to determine respectively which concept suits best. The results show which concepts suit best in certain situations for the case study conducted. --short-term control,financial services,business process simulation

Stand der Literatur zur operativen Steuerung von Dienstleistungsprozessen

Services are characterised by the integration of customers while the service is produced. This integration leads to interruptions in the processing of a customer order until the customer provides the missing input. Since customer behaviour can be planned to a certain extent only challenges in planning an efficient delivery of a service process arise. This holds especially true for operational control as it has to correct deviances in the short-term. Thus, the following research question occurs: How can service processes be controlled efficiently taking customer integration into account? The aim of this working paper is to conduct a comprehensive literature review with regard to the research question. The results show that the majority of approaches are originate from manufacturing dealing with processes mainly conducted by machines and having stock-keeping possibilities. These manufacturing processes and the approaches typically do not deal with the complex influence of customer integration on operational control as in the case of service processes. It is concluded that a sufficient answer to control service processes is missing so far and thus potential research areas are addressed. --operational control,services,literature review

Towards Learning Business Process Management Thinking

Business process management is indisputable an approach many organizations are aiming to adopt. While much emphasis is put on modeling business processes and designing information systems, the employees working in a process-oriented organization often struggle with these changes. Here, it is of major importance for organizations to take their employees with this change of mind towards process orientation to be successful. However, the question how an organization can support its employees in learning process-oriented thinking, remains open so far in the literature. Thus, this research-in-progress paper presents first results in trying to explore how employees can be supported. A rather new empirical method in this research field, namely a questionnaire experiment, is used. Based on a sample of 114 participants, we find empirical support for our hypotheses that learning in general matters with regard to process-oriented thinking. Organizations are better off when their employees learn process-oriented thinking by doing in comparison to provide documentations in order to actively promote learning

YUMA – An AI Planning Agent for Composing IT Services from Infrastructure-as-Code Specifications

Infrastructure-as-code enables cloud architects to automate IT service delivery by specifying IT services through machine-readable definition files. To allow for a reusability of the infrastructure-as-code specifications, cloud architects specify IT services as compositions of sub-processes. As the AI planning agents for automated IT service composition proposed by prior research fall short in the infrastructure-as-code context, we design a search-based problem-solving agent named YUMA according to a design science research process to fill this research gap. YUMA holds a search tree reflecting the state space and transition model. It includes an algorithm for building the search tree and two algorithms for determining the minimum composition plan. The underlying IT service composition problem is explicated for the infrastructure-as-code context and formulated as a search problem. The results of the demonstration and evaluation show that YUMA fulfills the requirements necessary to solve this problem and digitizes an important task of cloud architects

Facilitating Operational Control of Business Services: A Method for Analysing and Structuring Customer Integration

The efficient delivery of services is a major task for service companies to survive in competition. But, services are characterised by the integration of customers in the process of service delivery. In this context, operational control of business services is an important issue as business service performance often suffers from operational problems caused by customers involved. In order to react, a service company has to identify the possible options for operational control clearly. This is not easy as the impact of customer integration is ambiguous. To facilitate this, a method for analysing and structuring customer integration in business services is proposed. The aim is to cluster, quantify and qualify customer integration in business services from a production point of view. Applying this method (as demonstrated using a real business service) operational control will be facilitated due to a better transparency of customer integration

Towards assessing the value of digital self-service options from a provider perspective

Given the ongoing digitization of service, understanding the value co-creation process in the self-service context is getting more and more relevant for practitioners and academics alike. Prior research on service co-production has primarily focused on the service beneficiaries’ causal paths of value determination or has conceptualized value as utility relying on neo-classical economic concepts and theories. As a result, little is known about how to assess the value-in-experience of digital self-service options from a service provider’s perspective. This study represents a first contribution towards answering this research question. Based on the results of a systematic literature review, we develop a framework that enables service organizations to assess the expected and perceived value before, during or after an actual service experience. It therefore conceptualizes value in form of net benefit and means-end. Drawing upon the framework, we discuss various value enhancement strategies reflecting different categories of self-service options

Identifying the Factors influencing Self-Service Technology Usage Intention – A Meta-Analysis

Service organizations introduce self-service technologies to their customers to reduce cost and realize efficiency gains. However, for service organizations to realize such benefits, the customers must use the SSTs provided. Results from prior studies are too diverse to derive a proper set of relevant factors that must be considered in this regard. A meta-analysis was conducted and the findings of prior studies that have investigated factors influencing the customers’ intentions to use SSTs were synthesized. 13 factors directly influencing the customers’ intentions to use SSTs were identified from 26 prior studies. The meta-analysis provides the following contributions. First, SSTs must be designed and marketed according to the customers’ familiarity with their usage. Second, the resources that are required from the customers must be considered when designing SSTs. Third, customers should not be forced to use SSTs. The research findings offer practical advice on how to design and market SSTs

Towards a Methodology to Assess Changes in IT Business Value in Terms of Business Process Performance

Scientific literature strongly indicates that IT business value is best observed on the level of business processes. However, methodologies by which the contribution of IT can be systematically analyzed on a business processes level are currently insufficient. Therefore, this paper presents a methodology which, proceeding from a given status quo, analyzes and measures changes in IT usage in business processes. The proposed methodology combines the possibilities of the methods Data Envelopment Analysis and Business Process Simulation. An example of application will demonstrate how effects on business process performance resulting from changes in IT usage can be analyzed and measured in a practical application by means of this methodology. The results show that this methodology bears potential for analyzing about the quantification of IT contribution to business value. It allows an assessment of IT business value due to changes in IT usage before an investment decision in IT is made

Framework of a Process Laboratory for the Operational Control of Service Processes

Service processes such as financial advice, booking a business trip or conducting a consulting project have emerged as units of analysis of high interest for the business process and service management communities in practice and academia. While the transactional nature of production processes is relatively well understood and deployed, the less predictable and highly interactive nature of service processes still lacks in many areas appropriate methodological grounding. This paper proposes a framework of a process laboratory as a new IT artefact in order to facilitate the holistic analysis and simulation of such service processes. Using financial services as an example, it will be shown how such a process laboratory can be used to reduce the complexity of service process analysis and facilitate operational service process control

Identification and analysis of handovers in organisations using process model repositories

Purpose Identifying handovers is an important but difficult to achieve goal for companies as handovers have advantages allowing for specialisation in processes as well as disadvantages by creating erroneous interfaces. Design/methodology/approach Conceptualisation of a method based on theory and evaluation with company data using a process model repository. Findings The method allows to evaluate handovers from the perspective of roles in processes and grouping of employees in organisational units. It uses existing process model repositories connected with organisational chart information in companies to determine the density of handovers. The method is successfully evaluated using the example of a major telecommunications company with 1,010 process models in its repository. Practical implications Companies can determine on various levels, up to the overall organisational level, in which parts of the company efforts are best spent to manage handovers in an optimal way. Originality/value This paper is first in showing how handovers can be conceptualised and identified with a large-scale method