Hybrid process modelling within business process management projects

Business Process Management (BPM) is still an important research topic amongst both academics and businesses. The recent recession has forced businesses to focus on cost control and efficiency in order to better cope with the economic downturn. Many companies in this situation turn to BPM software as a means of improving their efficiency and costs by reducing aspects of the business such as process lead-times and material costs. In order to identify areas of the business and its processes which require changing the business will most likely adopt a method of modelling their business processes. Because of the large number of available techniques decision makers usually struggle to decide the best approach. Recent literature has also pointed out that prevalent modelling techniques are designed to serve one specific purpose and may not be capable of modelling the whole picture. The key relationship between the information systems and the human behaviour is one example of where existing techniques are biased towards opposite ends of the scale. This paper proposes the use of a hybrid modelling notation composed of multiple existing notations in order to bridge this. The hybrid notation was applied to a BPM project at a company in the construction industry and a case study conducted with its users

Size-dependent behaviour of functionally graded sandwich microbeams based on the modified couple stress theory

Abstract Static bending, buckling and free vibration behaviours of size-dependent functionally graded (FG) sandwich microbeams are examined in this paper based on the modified couple stress theory and Timoshenko beam theory. To avoid the use of a shear correction factor, equilibrium equations were used to compute the transverse shear force and shear stress. Two types of sandwich beams were considered: (1) homogeneous core and FG skins and (2) FG core and homogeneous skins. Numerical results were presented to illustrate the small scale effects on the behaviours of FG sandwich beams. The results reveals that the inclusion of the size effects results in an increase in the beam stiffness, and consequently, leads to a reduction of deflections and stresses and an increase in natural frequencies and critical buckling loads. Such effects are more pronounced when the beam depth was small, but they become negligible with the increase of the beam depth

The Synonym management process in SAREL

The specification phase is one of the most important and least supported parts of the software development process. The SAREL system has been conceived as a knowledge-based tool to improve the specification phase. The purpose of SAREL (Assistance System for Writing Software Specifications in Natural Language) is to assist engineers in the creation of software specifications written in Natural Language (NL). These documents are divided into several parts. We can distinguish the Introduction and the Overall Description as parts that should be used in the Knowledge Base construction. The information contained in the Specific Requirements Section corresponds to the information represented in the Requirements Base. In order to obtain high-quality software requirements specification the writing norms that define the linguistic restrictions required and the software engineering constraints related to the quality factors have been taken into account. One of the controls performed is the lexical analysis that verifies the words belong to the application domain lexicon which consists of the Required and the Extended lexicon. In this sense a synonym management process is needed in order to get a quality software specification. The aim of this paper is to present the synonym management process performed during the Knowledge Base construction. Such process makes use of the Spanish Wordnet developed inside the Eurowordnet project. This process generates both the Required lexicon and the Extended lexicon that will be used during the Requirements Base construction.Postprint (published version

Google matrix of business process management

Development of efficient business process models and determination of their characteristic properties are subject of intense interdisciplinary research. Here, we consider a business process model as a directed graph. Its nodes correspond to the units identified by the modeler and the link direction indicates the causal dependencies between units. It is of primary interest to obtain the stationary flow on such a directed graph, which corresponds to the steady-state of a firm during the business process. Following the ideas developed recently for the World Wide Web, we construct the Google matrix for our business process model and analyze its spectral properties. The importance of nodes is characterized by Page-Rank and recently proposed CheiRank and 2DRank, respectively. The results show that this two-dimensional ranking gives a significant information about the influence and communication properties of business model units. We argue that the Google matrix method, described here, provides a new efficient tool helping companies to make their decisions on how to evolve in the exceedingly dynamic global market.Comment: submitted to European Journal of Physics

Business Process Management 2014 : Status quo und Perspektiven eines ganzheitlichen Geschäftsprozessmanagements : Ergebnisse einer branchenübergreifenden empirischen Studie + Themenfokus "Business Process Management in der Immobilienwirtschaft"

StudieDas Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik an der ZHAW School of Management and Law führt in regelmässigen Abständen empirische Studien durch, um den Stand und die Perspektiven des Geschäftsprozessmanagements in Unternehmen zu erheben. Die Studie «Business Process Management 2011» ergab, dass Organisationen das Potenzial eines methoden- und IT-gestützten Geschäftsprozessmanagements noch nicht vollumfänglich ausschöpfen. Die vorliegende Studie baut hierauf auf und untersucht, wie sich Organisationen im deutschsprachigen Raum weiter in Richtung eines ganzheitlichen Geschäftsprozessmanagements entwickelt haben. Die Studie fokussiert die drei Aspekte strategische Orientierung, prozessorientierte Organisation sowie Methoden & Technologien und beabsichtigt, die Ausprägung dieser Gestaltungselemente zu überprüfen, um Rückschlüsse auf den Stand eines ganzheitlichen Geschäftsprozessmanagements in Organisationen im deutschsprachigen Raum zu ziehen. Die branchenübergreifende Analyse wird um einen Branchenfokus «Immobilienwirtschaft» ergänzt

Next-generation Process Management with ADEPT2

Short time-to-market, easy adaptation to changes in business environment, and robustness of processes are key requirements in today’s business world. In the IT area of Business Process Management (BPM), solutions claim to satisfy these new demands, but are still not sufficient.\ud In this paper we present a short overview on how these challenges are tackled by the ADEPT and AristaFlow projects and demonstrate a prototypical implementation

Autonomous Agents for Business Process Management

Traditional approaches to managing business processes are often inadequate for large-scale organisation-wide, dynamic settings. However, since Internet and Intranet technologies have become widespread, an increasing number of business processes exhibit these properties. Therefore, a new approach is needed. To this end, we describe the motivation, conceptualization, design, and implementation of a novel agent-based business process management system. The key advance of our system is that responsibility for enacting various components of the business process is delegated to a number of autonomous problem solving agents. To enact their role, these agents typically interact and negotiate with other agents in order to coordinate their actions and to buy in the services they require. This approach leads to a system that is significantly more agile and robust than its traditional counterparts. To help demonstrate these benefits, a companion paper describes the application of our system to a real-world problem faced by British Telecom

ADEPT2 - Next Generation Process Management Technology

If current process management systems shall be applied to a broad spectrum of applications, they will have to be significantly improved with respect to their technological capabilities. In particular, in dynamic environments it must be possible to quickly implement and deploy new processes, to enable ad-hoc modifications of single process instances at runtime (e.g., to add, delete or shift process steps), and to support process schema evolution with instance migration, i.e., to propagate process schema changes to already running instances. These requirements must be met without affecting process consistency and by preserving the robustness of the process management system. In this paper we describe how these challenges have been addressed and solved in the ADEPT2 Process Management System. Our overall vision is to provide a next generation process management technology which can be used in a variety of application domains