Thesis (MBA)--Stellenbosch University, 2000. / Some digitised pages may appear cut off due to the condition of the original hard copy. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The NewCo Medical company (NewCo ) is a simulated manufacturing and marketing company. It manufactures plastic utility goods in the health and baby-care industries, and proceeds to market these goods globally. NewCo intends to raise money in order to fund its operations and marketing drive, since it is poised for huge and imminent growth. The business simulation intends to demonstrate the value and effectiveness of the business plan, and to encourage the reader to investigate the issues that pertain to the successful operation of a business, beyond its description in the business pIan. The reader is invited to analyse the business pIan and its proposed strategies, bearing in mind that the pIan has been developed and presented with a potential investor in mind. This exercise should create an awareness of the importance of a due diligence to be performed before any investment decision can be made. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: geen

This study explores complexity metrics for business artifact process models described by Case Management Model and Notation (CMMN). Process models are usually described using Business Process Management (BPM), which is a relatively mature discipline with a large number of practitioners. Over the last few decades a new way of describing data intensive business processes has emerged in BPM literature, for which traditional BPM is no longer adequate. This emerging method, used to describe more flexible processes, is called business artifacts with Guard-Stage-Milestone (GSM). The work on GSM influenced CMMN, which was created to fill a market need for more flexible case management processes for knowledge workers. Complexity metrics have been developed for traditional BPM models, such as the Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). However, traditional BPM is not suitable for describing GSM or CMMN process models. Therefore, complexity metrics developed for traditional process models may not be applicable to business artifact process models such as CMMN. This study addresses this gap by exploring complexity metrics for business artifact process models using CMMN. The findings of this study have practical implications for the CMMN standard and for the commercial products implementing CMMN. This research makes the following contributions: • The development of a formal description of CMMN using first-order logic. • An exploration of the relationship between CMMN and GSM and the development of transformation procedures between them. • A comparison between the method complexity of CMMN and other popular process methods, including BPMN, Unified Modeling Language (UML) Activity diagrams, and Event-driven Process Charts (EPC). • The creation of a systematic literature review of complexity metrics for process models, which was conducted in order to inform the creation of CMMN metrics. • The identification of a set of complexity metrics for the CMMN standard, which underwent theoretical and empirical validation. This research advances literature in the areas of method complexity, complexity metrics for process models, declarative processes, and research on CMMN by characterizing CMMN method complexity, identifying complexity metrics for CMMN, and exploring the relationship between CMMN and GSM. / Ph.D. (Computer Science)