Research report (M.Com. (Information Systems))--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Commerce, Law and Management, School of Economic and Business Sciences, 2013. / Using the resource based view of the firm theory, a research model is proposed that explains how IT governance capability results in improved firm performance by improving a firm’s IT Infrastructure capabilities and business processes. The research model is explored by means of case study where a survey is undertaken with the key stakeholders of a global Corporate and Investment Bank. Data was collected and analysed from 140 respondents using an online survey. The model hypotheses were not tested. The respondents’ characteristics (role, region, business area and length of experience) were explored providing greater insight and confirmation of the general relationship between the variables. The case study confirmed the general relationships of the model except the training capability - firm performance relationship. The IT governance process formality moderator provided results that were in contradiction to expectations. The IT intensity moderator confirmed the general relationship. The strength or weaknesses of the relationships when analysing the respondent characteristics are insightful and would not normally have been available if a multi-site survey had been performed.

The thesis, entitled "Six Sigma and improvement of the specific financial control" deals with the Six Sigma methodology in general in theoretical part. It defines the method, the objectives of its establishment, its history, next, theoretical part covers key aspects of Six Sigma, its principles and benefits, tools, management responsibilities for Six Sigma, the COQ in terms of Six Sigma philosophy and most important, the DMAIC methodology, which combines theoretical and empirical part of the project. Practical part illustrates the use of Six Sigma, mainly the process of DMAICR method for ongoing project of the accounting department of financial headquarter of no - named international company operating in Slovakia, which aims to improve the reconciliation process of the Hypotax account as the reason of identifying the weaknesses and significant deficiencies in the process.

Nearly 70% of process improvement projects are failing to provide the expected benefits (Grant 2002). The cost of process improvement projects can be quite substantial and the number of these projects occurring within organisations continues to increase. John Thorp (1998) describes an environment in which managers are struggling to demonstrate the connection between costs and expected business benefits. This eighteen month master's research project has identified a gap in both the academic literature and the business practices of most organisations. This thesis aims to make explicit the selection of processes to improve and to provide the link between process objectives and organisational goals (Davenport 1993; Hammer and Champy 1993). Published literature, coupled with the experience of the research team, has resulted in the development of a targeting methodology for defining and ranking critical processes, and then selecting which of those critical processes to improve first. Although the research team believes that the methodology is applicable to many industries, the research was undertaken in the application hosting centre (AHC) and application service provision (ASP) industry. A focus group and follow on Delphi study was used to ensure that the processes and functional area focused upon was of importance to the participants of the research. This research project was funded by the Australian Research Council's Linkage projects and undertaken with support by REALTECH. The participants included the top three information systems outsourcing companies in Australia and another in the top ten of this industry. The study commenced with identifying critical processes in the ASP environment. This involved both a focus group session and a Delphi study. The Delphi study was followed by four action learning cycles using case studies (action, observe, reflect and revise). These action learning cycles using case studies have revealed that the methodology (which includes the steps to implement the methodology) meets the needs of organisations to identify and select 'critical' processes for improvement. It provides business and researchers with a logical and explicit method to reduce the 'squeaky wheel' and 'latest fad' approaches to process improvement projects. These prior approaches improve processes not necessarily critical for achieving organisational goals consuming limited resources for little gain. The targeting method makes the alignment of process objectives with goals by explicitly linking processes to organisational goals possible. The limitations of this research project are that it does not intend to verify the achievement of business benefit, document the change to an organisation due to its use of the targeting methodology or determine the long term benefits to an organisation using the targeting methodology. These questions might be answered in a longer and larger study as this project is limited to an eighteen month time frame. As for generalisability, the study has focused on the AHC and ASP industries, and the participants, while operating within this industry, are quite different. For the different phases of this project the participants come from in-house providers, multinational outsourcing providers, commercialised government providers, specialist niche product providers, and enterprise system suppliers.

The extensive use of fossil fuels coupled with its decreasing availability has ignited many countries to enact policies on energy usage. Energy Services Companies (ESCOs) all over the world are implementing initiatives to save energy. The South African ESCO industry must still overcome many barriers for it to be as effective as other global ESCOs. One of the stakeholders of an energy-savings intervention is the measurement and verification (M&V) team. The M&V team aims to provide objective and independent quantification of energy savings realised during an intervention. Despite the importance of the M&V function, the M&V process was shown to be inefficient, lacking in standardisation and research. The focus of this dissertation is to identify opportunities for improvement within the M&V process and to determine methods for the easy management thereof. The first two research aims are met by evaluating the process and determining the requirements for improving the process with regard to the critical areas that were identified. It is realised that the management of the M&V process could be simplified by using an information management system. This leads to the design of an information management system for the M&V process using the knowledge obtained during the evaluation. A case study is performed on one of South Africa’s largest ESCOs. The findings of the case study underline improvements regarding certain performance indicators. Moreover, the findings suggest that an information management system can support all the desired process requirements. / MIng (Mechanical Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

The extensive use of fossil fuels coupled with its decreasing availability has ignited many countries to enact policies on energy usage. Energy Services Companies (ESCOs) all over the world are implementing initiatives to save energy. The South African ESCO industry must still overcome many barriers for it to be as effective as other global ESCOs. One of the stakeholders of an energy-savings intervention is the measurement and verification (M&V) team. The M&V team aims to provide objective and independent quantification of energy savings realised during an intervention. Despite the importance of the M&V function, the M&V process was shown to be inefficient, lacking in standardisation and research. The focus of this dissertation is to identify opportunities for improvement within the M&V process and to determine methods for the easy management thereof. The first two research aims are met by evaluating the process and determining the requirements for improving the process with regard to the critical areas that were identified. It is realised that the management of the M&V process could be simplified by using an information management system. This leads to the design of an information management system for the M&V process using the knowledge obtained during the evaluation. A case study is performed on one of South Africa’s largest ESCOs. The findings of the case study underline improvements regarding certain performance indicators. Moreover, the findings suggest that an information management system can support all the desired process requirements. / MIng (Mechanical Engineering), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2014

Business process reengineering (BPR) has been considered as one of the key approaches to increasing the competitive edge of many modern enterprises. Many big enterprises have taken diversified degree of reengineering to their business processes. The importance of understanding the existing business processes and evaluating the new business processes before they are actually deployed is commonly recognized. Without careful examination of the existing and new business processes, the change in business process. In this research, we look into the business process analysis issues under the scope of BPR. We first examine various models for business processes. As each model is invented with a purpose, e.g., for identifying the critical path in a factory manufacturing environment, for automating workflow in an office environment, etc., they may not be completely suitable for business process analysis. We try to identify the requirements of business process analysis and propose a model to meet these requirements. We finally design and implement a business process analyzer. This business process analyzer use our proposed business process model and is able to answer the queries from the BPR team expressed by our proposed query language.

The main object of this master's thesis is to introduce process management and then apply it on a real company. The aim of the theoretical part was to define terms used in process management and describe it from different perspectives. An outline of the history of process management has offered insights into the personalities and the companies that have played a part in how the process management has arisen, and therefore how it looks today. Business process improvement and implementing business management have been the subjects of further theoretical subchapters. These methodologies included reengineering, Kaizen, TOC, Lean, Six Sigma. Process mapping is described in the end of the theoretical part. The theoretical knowledge was then applied in the practical part of this thesis. Firstly the company ČZ a.s. was introduced. However the domain of this thesis have become a mapping and describing of business processes in the company mainly in the Sales Department of the Tools Division. The conclusion is how to change the process of Order management in the Sales Department and how it will affect the Tools Division.

The topic of this diploma thesis is Process innovation for a national branch of se-lected multinational IS/ICT company. The aim of the thesis is to improve corporate process based on the process analysis methodologies and evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed change. The theoretical part is devoted to the basic terms such as process management, modeling and process improvement. The practical part is de-voted to the description of the original process, its analysis and proposed process improvement. The process is analyzed by DMAIC method in conjunction with model SIPOC. The proposed solution is to implement a system of interactive voice re-sponse, which has a positive effect on the productivity of the team during the pro-cess of providing credit limit. The remaining part of the thesis is devoted to evalua-tion of the effectiveness of the proposed change and the possibility of its implemen-tation also to other branches with similar business goals.

The Business Process Management (BPM) lifecycle consists of four phases: design and analysis, configuration, enactment, and evaluation - also known as performance analysis and improvement. Performance analysis and improvement of business processes, one of the core phases in the BPM life cycle, is becoming on top of the agenda for many enterprises. An emerging approach to that is to use the business intelligence approaches that attempt to facilitate the analytical capabilities of business process management systems by implementing process-oriented data warehouse and mining techniques. However, little work has been has done on developing core methods and tools for performance analysis and improvement of business processes. In particular, adequate methods, clearly defined steps or instructions that can guide process managers for analyzing and improving processes using process warehouse (PW) are not available. In the absence of such methods, guidelines or clearly defined steps, important steps may be ignored and credible improvements steps cannot be taken. This research addresses the described limitations by developing a method for performance analysis and improvement of business processes. The key feature of the developed method is, it employs business-orientation in the design and utilization of a PW. The method is composed of three steps, building goal-structure, integrating goal-structure with PW, and analyzing and improving business processes. During the first step, a set of top-level performance goals are identified for the process of interest. Subsequently, the identified  goals are decomposed to generate a goal-structure that is aligned with the functional decomposition of the process of interest. The second step describes a technique for integrating the generated goal-structure with PW. The third step describes, a performance estimation model, a decision model and a step by step approach that focuses on utilizing PW for analysis and improvement of business processes. In order to facilitate the use of the proposed method a prototype is developed. The prototype offers a graphical user interface for defining goal structure, integrating goals with PW, and goal-based navigation of PW. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we first develop an evaluation framework and subsequently use it for the evaluation of the proposed method. The framework consists of three components, each representing a type of evaluation. The components are, methodological-structure evaluation, performance-based evaluation and perception-based evaluation. The results of the evaluation show partial support for the methodological structure. However, the results of performance and perception evaluation show promising results of the proposed method. / <p>QC 20121217</p>

Les entreprises de l’industrie du luxe sont aujourd’hui soumises à une pression constante de la part des marchés pour développer et produire une plus grande variété de nouveaux produits dans des délais toujours plus courts. Néanmoins, cela doit se réaliser en répondant tout à la fois aux critères fondamentaux de l’industrie tels que concevoir l’unique, réaliser l’extravagance et rendre le produit à son plus haut niveau de qualité. L’amélioration des processus de développement de produits par les paradigmes du lean et de l’agilité connus sous le terme «leagility» peut apporter des réponses à ces défis. Poursuivis conjointement, les objectifs du lean et de l’agilité se focalisent d’une part sur l’élimination des gaspillages tout en créant un flux continu sur la chaîne de valeur et d’autre part, se concentrent sur une réponse proactive face à la demande des marchés. Cependant, considérant la multiplicité de techniques et d’outils leagiles, il n’est pas simple pour une organisation de sélectionner les initiatives de transformation les plus performantes ainsi que les activités à réaliser afin de répondre efficacement aux besoins d’amélioration spécifique relatifs aux objectifs stratégiques de l’entreprise. Définir, déployer et piloter un plan de transformation cohérent par rapport à la vision de l’organisation et considérant son niveau de maturité d’adoption des bonnes pratiques en développement de produits requièrent une rigueur et une implication soutenue des membres de l’organisation ainsi qu’une vision claire des objectifs à atteindre lesquels s’illustreront par des résultats tangibles et mesurables. Reconnaissant cette difficulté industrielle, cette thèse propose une méthodologie de transformation leagile en développement de produits permettant de conduire la transformation d’une organisation sur tout son cycle de vie allant de l’initialisation de la vision jusqu’au pilotage des initiatives d’amélioration leagiles de manière incrémentale. En d’autres termes, l’approche soutient les utilisateurs et les guide dans la conduite d’un diagnostic de maturité, dans la sélection des leviers d’amélioration appropriés, dans le choix des outils et des techniques d’amélioration associés ainsi que dans la construction et dans le déploiement d’un plan d’intervention reposant sur une séquence détaillée d’activités prenant en compte les bonnes pratiques de la conduite du changement. / .Luxury industry companies are subjected to constant pressure from markets to develop and produce more varieties of new products in shorter delays. Nevertheless, this must be realized without compromising fundamental criterion such as designing unique products, developing extravagance, achieving top quality level and renewing the offering while, at the same time, retaining the brand image and elitism of the product. Lean and agile concepts, known by the term “leagility”, offer potential answers for facing these challenges and to improve product development processes . Pursued together, lean and agile objectives focalize on waste elimination while creating a continuous flow on the value chain. However, considering the large number of leagile techniques and tools, it is not easy for an organization to select the most efficient transformation initiatives and the most adequate activities to be implemented to meet achieve their strategic objectives. Defining, deploying, and steering a consistent transformation plan in line with the organisation’s vision and its level of maturity in terms of adoption of best practices calls for rigour and considerable involvement of the organisation members, as well as a clear vision of the objectives to be achieved. This thesis proposes a leagile transformation methodology for guiding industrials in a product development organisation transformation along its entire life cycle from the definition of a clear vision to the deployment of leagile improvement initiatives. The proposed approach supports users in conducting a maturity diagnostic, in selecting appropriate levers for improvement, in choosing related tools and related improvement techniques with the aim of constructing, and rolling out a transformation plan which relies on change management best practices.