<p>When implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, the system has to be adapted to the organisation. But just as important, the business processes of the organisation have to be reengineered in order to take full advantage of the ERP system. Noblessa Sverige AB, which is a sales company to the German kitchen producer Nobilia, has been growing remarkably since the start 2001 and has begun discussing an ERP system purchase. The order process of today has reached the limit of its capacity and something has to be done in order to meet the increasing sales volume.</p><p>The purpose of this master’s thesis is to analyse and reengineer the order process as a preparation for an ERP system implementation. The outcome of this thesis is a suggestion of a process model of the order process, which also can be used as a foundation for a requirements specification for the ERP system purchase. In order to take advantage of the benefits of the existing order process, the reengineering starts with mapping the current process.</p><p>Noblessa Sverige AB is a company that is growing and changing from one day to another. Changes have arisen during the writing of this thesis which has made the work even more interesting and challenging. The most important change is the opening of a central warehouse in Norrköping, which has been taken in consideration when we designed the new process model.</p><p>After mapping and achieving an understanding of the current order process, we found a few things that could be improved. Above all, there exist many manual tasks that can be automated with the ERP system. Furthermore, there are tasks that should be moved from one department or function to another because it is more suitable to perform them there. We also found that Noblessa Sverige AB should improve the integration and cooperation with its suppliers, especially Nobilia. Nobilia is the main owner and main supplier of Noblessa Sverige AB, the conditions for cooperation are therefore very good.</p>

Thesis (M.B.A.)--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2007.

<p>AB Svenska Spel är ett statligt ägt monopolföretag som levererar spel och lotter till det svenska samhället. I detta examensarbete har AB Svenska Spel och dess avdelning ombudsekonomi verkat som fallföretag. Avdelningen, vilken är placerad vid huvudkontoret i Visby, valdes ut då ekonomichefen deklarerade att deras arbetssätt upplevdes ineffektivt av medarbetarna.</p><p>Examensarbetet inleddes med en förstudie där olika förbättringsområden inom avdelningen identifierades, där ett beslut sedan fattads att två av dessa områden som skulle vara i fokus i examensarbetet. De delar i avdelningen som skulle granskas var kreditbevakning samt arbetsflödet och de interna överlämningarna. Gemensamt för de identifierade förbättringsområdena var att dessa kunde ses som symtom på att avdelningen inte arbetade systematiskt med kvalitetsutveckling eller med en tydlig verksamhetsstyrning. Detta innebar i praktiken att avdelningens övergripande ramverk, riktlinjer och målstyrning helt saknades.</p><p>Vad avdelningens funktion och syfte var, hur medarbetarna bidrog till resterande organisation eller hur de bidrog externt till det svenska samhället kunde inte redogöras för. Inte heller någon dokumenterad information om detta återfanns och var inte uttalad. Medarbetarna kunde vidare inte redogöra för hur avdelningens interna arbetsmoment och arbetsuppgifter tillsammans bidrog till en enhetlig avdelning som gemensamt arbetade mot samma riktning. Följaktligen arbetades ett övergripande ramverk fram för avdelningen genom att insamlat material har kombinerats med existerande teorier om verksamhetsstyrning, till exempel offensiv kvalitetsutveckling och processkartläggning.</p><p>För att skapa en helhet har avdelningens uppdrag och huvudprocess identifierats och sedan brutits ned i nya riktlinjer och arbetsdokument som rör kreditbedömningarna och på så sätt har arbetet konkritiserats och effektiviserats. Resultatet är att en röd tråd skapats mellan AB Svenska Spels övergripande vision och målbild och avdelningen ombudsekonomi genom att en anpassad affärsidé och vision skapats vilken är en förlängning på ett formulerat uppdrag. För att ytterligare konkritisera hur avdelningen kan styras samt hur mätning och nyckeltal kan användas har ett balanserat styrkort skapats. Vidare har resultatet med examensarbetet bidragit till att systematiska angreppssätt presenteras för att främja analys och ständiga förbättringar. Genom att anpassa hörnstensmodellen till avdelningen har nya värdegrunder skapats som ska verka som en stabil grund för långsiktigt hållbart arbete.</p><p>Då examensarbetet inte inkluderar att resultatet som presenteras i denna rapport implementeras på avdelningen eller kan påvisa en reell effekthämtning har en åtgärdsplan och förslag till fortsatt arbete tagits fram och överlämnats till avdelningschefen. Detta ska möjliggöra att det systematiska arbetssättet fortskrider, förbättras ytterligare och det förändrade tankesättet bibehålls.</p> / <p>AB Svenska Spel is a state-owned company that delivers games and lottery to the Swedish society. In this essay, Svenska Spel and its unit ombudsekonomi acted as a case company. The unit, which is located at the Headquarters in Visby, was selected when the Chief Financial Officer declared that the employees felt that their workflow was ineffective and in need of change. Ombudsekonomi is part of the Finance Department and works with the company's establishment process for new customers, accounts receivable and management of the company's collection of debts.</p><p>This essay began with a pre-study which intended to identify areas of improvement within the department, which then would form the basis for this essay. The pre-study pointed out several  primarily, development of the unit's credit surveillance, head process and workflow, as well as internal handovers.</p><p>Common for all identified areas was that the unit didn ́t plan their work systematically or with total quality management, which is to be seen as a symptom of the lack of overall framework, policies and well-defined goals. The employees couldn ́t describe the function and purpose of the unit, or how they contributed to Svenska Spels organization or to the Swedish society. Neither could they express how the unit's internal actions and tasks together contributed to the common cause or how to work together to reach it, and we couldn't find any (for the unit) defined goals, vivion or overall assignment.</p><p>Therefore, a general framework was put together combining theories of total quality management and processes, mapping with the official strategies, vision and goals that were found in the Svenska Spel annual report. To enable this, information was collected, modified and reformulated to fit the unit's work situation. A mission, vision and strategy was made and new processes were established. This, together with new guidelines and documents for work practices, should make it possible for all the emplyees to work against the same goal in an effective and rationalized way that creates more value for the unit.</p><p>The result of this essay is the creation of a main thread from Svenska Spels overall existing framework down to the unit's work, as well as a new defined goal. To illustrate how this work can be implemented in different perspectives, a balance scorecard has been created including suggestions for measurement and key performance indicators. Furthermore, the result of this essay contributes to the unit's systematic approach to promote the analysis and continuous improvement based on fundamental proposed values.</p><p>However, this project does not include implementation of the results and is therefore not going to ensure the outcomes. An action and application plan for further work will be handed over to the unit's Team Leader. This ensure that the systematic work approach progress, is further improved and that the proposed mind set is maintained.</p>

In the last 50 years, a considerable amount of research workhas been completed in the mathematical system theory and theoryof control. Implementation of the results from this researchinto practice has drastically decreased the production costs.Most production processes are highly automated, and the use ofrobots in industry is growing. As far as office, or businessprocesses are concerned, the situation is quite different.Though the office workers and sales personnel have obtainedmuch help from the modern computers, the office and salesprocesses are far behind the production processes on the levelof automation. The computers are used in the office mainly tohelp in performing various activities, e.g., to write a letter,to print an invoice, to complete a transaction, etc. Thecontrol of the business processes in the office remains, to alarge extent, manual. There is a lot to gain if the controlover business processes could be automated, at leastpartially. The material presented in this thesis is aimed to supportthe following hypothesis: "The ideas worked out in the Mathematical system theory formodeling and controlling physical processes can be successfullyused for modeling and controlling business processes." Oneof the main ideas of mathematical system theory is to considera process as a set of valid trajectories in a state space, andthis idea is the keystone for the thesis. The thesis startswith reformulating the state-oriented approach for the domainof business processes to show what kind of sate space can beused in this domain. First, the approach is introducedinformally by means of an example. Next, a possibleformalization adjusted to the properties of business processesis discussed. Then, experimental evidences that the methodsuggested in the thesis can be used in practice are presented.The suggested method is also compared with other methods ofbusiness process modeling to find out the areas where it hasadvantages over the other methods. In the conclusion, theresults are summarized, and plansfor the future are drawn. Most of the material included in the thesis has beenpublished and presented at international conferences. Thecontribution of this thesis consists in organizing the materialin support of the main hypothesis.

Large multinational consulting organizations have rapidly expanded during the 90s. A central phenomenon in these organizations are formalized methods for carrying out consulting processes. Under the heading of "knowledge management" consulting organizations deploy extensive resources into the development and maintenance of detailed methods and tools. In parallel, some skepticism exists both in the research literature and among practitioners (clients and consultants) about the value of applying methods as guides for action in the complex and multifaceted consulting process.This thesis aims at understanding why methods are used in management consulting and how they are used. This is achieved by an investigation of the roles of methods within 1) the consultant's work with the client in the consulting project, 2) the consultant's individual problem solving and 3) the consulting company's knowledge system.Seven roles for methods are identified. A common denominator underlying these roles is the method's ability to provide a common language to those involved in the consulting process. This language supports reality creation, persuasion and legitimization, and knowledge exchange. / <p>Diss. Stockholm : Handelshögskolan, 1999. Spikblad saknas</p>

In economically turbulent times, Business Intelligence (BI) is increasingly being used to mitigate risk and increase certainty. The evolution of BI from a series of technologies to a platform for supporting strategies is analyzed in this thesis. The concentration is on how BI can streamline manufacturing, quality assurance, marketing and customer service are evaluated, as are the potential payoffs of increasing the level of insight an organization has. The thesis also includes analysis of how the more complex value chain processes including build-to-order, configure-to-order and quote-to-order can be made more efficient and profitable through the inclusion of BI and its associated analytics and technologies. The inclusion of the Delphi research technique makes this paper unique and strong in its content as well. The role of BI has shifted from being used in specific functional areas of an organization to being strategic in scope. The intent of this thesis is to evaluate its contributions to the customer-facing processes that are the most complex and most challenging to sustain, making BI an indispensible platform for their successful execution on the base of theories and practical experience of the BI experts.

When implementing an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, the system has to be adapted to the organisation. But just as important, the business processes of the organisation have to be reengineered in order to take full advantage of the ERP system. Noblessa Sverige AB, which is a sales company to the German kitchen producer Nobilia, has been growing remarkably since the start 2001 and has begun discussing an ERP system purchase. The order process of today has reached the limit of its capacity and something has to be done in order to meet the increasing sales volume. The purpose of this master’s thesis is to analyse and reengineer the order process as a preparation for an ERP system implementation. The outcome of this thesis is a suggestion of a process model of the order process, which also can be used as a foundation for a requirements specification for the ERP system purchase. In order to take advantage of the benefits of the existing order process, the reengineering starts with mapping the current process. Noblessa Sverige AB is a company that is growing and changing from one day to another. Changes have arisen during the writing of this thesis which has made the work even more interesting and challenging. The most important change is the opening of a central warehouse in Norrköping, which has been taken in consideration when we designed the new process model. After mapping and achieving an understanding of the current order process, we found a few things that could be improved. Above all, there exist many manual tasks that can be automated with the ERP system. Furthermore, there are tasks that should be moved from one department or function to another because it is more suitable to perform them there. We also found that Noblessa Sverige AB should improve the integration and cooperation with its suppliers, especially Nobilia. Nobilia is the main owner and main supplier of Noblessa Sverige AB, the conditions for cooperation are therefore very good.

Although service oriented architecture has reached a particular maturity level especially in the technological dimension, there is a lack of common and acceptable approach to design a software system through composition and integration of web services. In this thesis, a service oriented system design approach for Service Oriented Architecture based software development is introduced to fill this gap. This new methodology basically offers a procedural top-down decomposition of a given software system allowing several abstraction levels. At the higher levels of the decomposition, the system is divided into abstract nodes that correspond to process models in the decomposition tree. Any node is a process and keeps the sequence and the state information for the possible sub-processes in this decomposition tree. Nodes which are defined as process models may include some sub-nodes to present details for the intermediate levels of the model. Eventually at the leaf level, process models are decomposed into existing web services as the atomic units of system execution. All processes constructing the system decomposition tree are modeled with BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) to expose the algorithmic details of the design. This modeling technique is also supported with a graphical modeling language referred to as SOSEML (Service Oriented Software Engineering Modeling Language) that is also newly introduced in this thesis.

Today, with widespread use of Internet in many areas, the common procedures frequently encountered in business life such as contracting and negotiation need to be automated. The distributed structure of the Internet and the difficulty of resources dispersed on one center makes such a system to have a distributed architecture . In this study, for first time, automatization of a contracting form through business processes was proposed and was carried out. A peer to peer process contracting overlay what we call Peer-Con is developed. The system is an extension of Java Agent Development Framework (JADE) and uses IEEE Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) Agent Communication Language (ACL) standard. Cost aware flexible representation of process capabilities / description of an operator to decide on whether given capabilities turnout to an agreement or not and self organization of peer connectivity for better contracting performance are distinguishing features of the system. The system can easily be adapted to different domains while the core functionality remains the same. Practical use of Peer-Con is shown by two applications from different domains / Driving Route Calculation on Web Maps and Digital Signal Processing Module (DSPM) product planning domain.

Business process models are abstractions of concrete operational procedures that occur in the daily business of organizations. To cope with the complexity of these models, business process model abstraction has been introduced recently. Its goal is to derive from a detailed process model several abstract models that provide a high-level understanding of the process. While techniques for constructing abstract models are reported in the literature, little is known about the relationships between process instances and abstract models. In this paper we show how the state of an abstract activity can be calculated from the states of related, detailed process activities as they happen. The approach uses activity state propagation. With state uniqueness and state transition correctness we introduce formal properties that improve the understanding of state propagation. Algorithms to check these properties are devised. Finally, we use behavioral profiles to identify and classify behavioral inconsistencies in abstract process models that might occur, once activity state propagation is used. / Geschäftsprozessmodelle sind Abstraktionen konkreter operationaler Vorgänge, die im täglichen Geschäftsablauf von Organisationen auftreten. Um die Komplexität solcher Modelle zu bewältigen, wurde die Geschäftsprozessmodelabstraktion eingeführt. Ziel ist dabei, von einem detaillierten Prozessmodel mehrere abstrakte Modelle abzuleiten, um so auf einer höheren Abstraktionsstufe ein Verständnis für den Prozess zu bekommen. Während viel in der Literatur über Techniken zur Konstruktion abstrakter Modelle berichtet wurde, ist wenig über die Beziehungen zwischen Prozessinstanzen und abstrakten Modellen bekannt. In dieser Arbeit zeigen wir, wie der Zustand einer abstrakten Aktivität aus den Zuständen ihrer entsprechenden detaillierten Prozessaktivitäten zur Laufzeit berechnet werden kann. Der Ansatz basiert dabei auf der Übertragung des Aktivitätszustands. Mit der Zustandseindeutigkeit und der Korrektheit der Zustandstransitionen führen wir formale Kriterien ein, die das Verständnis der Zustandsübertragung erleichtern. Zudem sind Algorithmen entwickelt worden, um diese Kriterien zu überprüfen. Außerdem nutzen wir Verhaltensprofile um Inkonsistenzen im Verhalten abstrakter Prozessmodelle zu identifizieren und zu klassifizieren, die auftreten können, wenn die Aktivitätszustände gemäß den Regeln abgebildet werden.