面臨來自中國、越南廉價鞋品及國外鞋品業者高品牌知名度的威脅，台灣的鞋品零售業者除了在品質上力求精進外，開始逐漸轉型走向OBM（Original Brand Manufacture），企圖尋找相關的策略來因應來自國外的競爭。而在企業經營中，新產品開發的成功代表著獲利來源及取得競爭優勢的要項。鞋品零售產業屬於流行時尚業的一環，面對消費者快速多變、個性化的需求，如何從市場調查中精準的掌握消費者流行喜好及潛在需求，是業者進行鞋品開發時的一大考驗。 本研究採個案研究法，首先針對鞋品零售產業之經營環境進行檢視，並透過訪談與實地觀察，分析位於該產業龍頭的個案公司是如何透過導入門市服務創新—「鞋品e學專家服務系統」來精確掌握消費者需求變動，協助開發符合消費者需求之鞋品。本研究從兩個面向進行探討，其一先針對個案公司既有之新產品開發模式進行分析，接著探討導入服務創新後的新產品開發模式，並將兩模式進行比較，討論其中相異之處。最後，透過導入服務創新後之個案公司績效，以瞭解該模式所帶來之效益。 本研究期望探討個案公司係如何透過提供服務創新來改善其新產品開發模式，並提出一概念模式給台灣的業者參考。透過該模式，除了加強對消費者需求的掌握度外，更期許業者能瞭解如何提升鞋品的附加價值及經營績效，進而轉型至服務型精緻鞋業，提高國內鞋品零售廠商的競爭優勢。 / Nowadays, the Taiwanese footwear retail industry is facing two direct challenges: the low price footwear imported by Chinese and Vietnamese competitors, and also the dominant branding and marketing power of American and European leading players. In order to stay in the game, besides continuing improve the quality of footwear, the Taiwanese footwear retailers also starting to engaged with the strategy of OBM(Original Brand Manufacture), hoping to confront with the oversea competitors. On the other hand, a successful New Product Development(NPD) means the potential of gaining revenue and acquiring competition advantages. As one members of the fashion industry, the footwear retail industry also facing the rapid change in consumer demand, how to accurately grasp the needs and potential demand from the market remains a difficult task for all retailers. This thesis uses Case Study method. Firstly, the thesis surveyed the business environment of the footwear industry. Secondly, through interviews and field observations, the thesis analyzed the case company, to see how the company accurately grasps the demand of consumers by importing an innovative service system- Footwear E Expert Service System, and examined how this system helps the company to improve the NPD process. The analysis is divided into two aspects. One is the analysis of the traditional NPD model; another part is the analysis of the new NPD model after importing the new innovative service. Then these two models would be compared and discussed. Finally, the thesis analyzed the performance of the case company after the implementation of the system. The goal of this thesis is to examine how the case company improves its NPD model by importing the new service system, and hoping to provide a novel concept for the Taiwanese footwear retailers. In addition to NPD, this study also provides an example of enterprise transformation for the retailers from the traditional service model to tailor-made service model, and allows them to understand how to increase the added value and operating performance through the implementation of innovative service.

The purpose of business-IT alignment is to optimise the relation between business and IT in order to maximise the business value of IT. Successful business-IT alignment can be enabled by business processes and e-processes functioning as adaptive mediators between business and IT systems. Business processes are the ways actors work in enterprises and collaborate in value networks, while e-processes support a flexible flow of information between IT systems and business processes. The overall goal of this thesis is to propose methods for business process and e-process design and evaluation for achieving alignment between enterprise goals and IT systems. The methods are based on model-driven approaches, using enterprise and software models. More precisely, the proposed methods can be used for designing models of business processes supporting the fulfilment of enterprise goals in the setting of a value network; for designing models of generic and reusable business processes that support the fulfilment of enterprise goals; for designing models of e-processes that support a flexible alignment of IT systems with business processes; and for evaluating the extent to which business processes are aligned with enterprise goals and IT systems. The result of the thesis can be used to support business and system designers with practical knowledge on how to align business and IT systems in order to create efficient, high-quality, flexible and innovative organisations. The research presented in this thesis has been carried out following the design science paradigm. This paradigm is characterised by the creation of new and innovative artefacts for solving general problems, and the evaluation of their benefits and drawbacks.

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. / 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Workflow systems aim to provide automated support for the conduct of certain business processes. Workflow systems are driven by workflow specifications which among others, capture the execution interdependencies between various activities. These interdependencies are modelled by means of different control flow constructors, e.g., sequence, choice, parallelism and synchronisation. It has been shown in the research on workflow patterns that the support for and the interpretation of various control flow constructs varies substantially across workflow systems. Two of the most problematic patterns relate to the OR-join and to cancellation. An OR-join is used in situations when we need to model " wait and see" behaviour for synchronisation. Different approaches assign a different (often only intuitive) semantics to this type of join, though they do share the common theme that synchronisation is only to be performed for active paths. Depending on context assumptions this behaviour may be relatively easy to deal with, though in general its semantics is complicated, both from a definition point of view (in terms of formally capturing a desired intuitive semantics) and from a computational point of view (how does one determine whether an OR-join is enabled?). Many systems and languages struggle with the semantics and implementation of the OR-join because its non-local semantics require a synchronisation depending on an analysis of future execution paths. This may require some non-trivial reasoning. The presence of cancellation features and other OR-joins in a workflow further complicates the formal semantics of the OR-join. The cancellation feature is commonly used to model external events that can change the behaviour of a running workflow. It can be used to either disable activities in certain parts of a workflow or to stop currently running activities. Even though it is possible to cancel activities in workflow systems using some sort of abort function, many workflow systems do not provide direct support for this feature in the workflow language. Sometimes, cancellation affects only a selected part of a workflow and other activities can continue after performing a cancellation action. As cancellation occurs naturally in business scenarios, comprehensive support in a workflow language is desirable. We take on the challenge of providing formal semantics, verification techniques as well as an implementation for workflows with those features. This thesis addresses three interrelated issues for workflows with cancellation regions and OR-joins. The concept of the OR-join is examined in detail in the context of the workflow language YAWL, a powerful workflow language designed to support a collection of workflow patterns and inspired by Petri nets. The OR-join semantics has been redesigned to represent a general, formal, and decidable approach for workflows in the presence of cancellation regions and other OR-joins. This approach exploits a link that is proposed between YAWL and reset nets, a variant of Petri nets with a special type of arc that can remove all tokens from a place. Next, we explore verification techniques for workflows with cancellation regions and OR-joins. Four structural properties have been identified and a verification approach that exploits coverability and reachability notions from reset nets has been proposed. The work on verification techniques has highlighted potential problems with calculating state spaces for large workflows. Applying reduction rules before carrying out verification can decrease the size of the problem by cutting down the size of the workflow that needs to be examined while preserving some essential properties. Therefore, we have extended the work on verification by proposing reduction rules for reset nets and for YAWL nets with and without OR-joins. The proposed OR-join semantics as well as the proposed verification approach have been implemented in the YAWL environment.

Business process analysis and integration are key endeavours for today's enterprises. Recently, Web services have been widely adopted for the implementation and integration of business processes within and across enterprises. In this dissertation, we investigate the problem of enabling the analysis of service interactions, in today's enterprises, in the context of business process executions, and that of service integration. Our study shows that only fraction of interactions in the enterprise are supported by process-aware systems. However, enabling above-mentioned analyses requires: (i) a model of the underlying business process to be used as a reference for the analysis, and (ii) the ability to correlate events generated during service interactions into process instances. We refer to a process model and the corresponding process instances as a "process view". We propose the concept of process space to refer to all process related information sources in the enterprise, over which various process views are defined. We propose the design and development of a system called "process space discovery system" (PSDS) for discovering process views in a process space. We introduce novel approaches for the correlation of events into process instances, focusing on the public processes of Web services (business protocols), and also for the discovery of the business protocol models from the process instances of a process view. Analysis of service integration approaches shows that while standardisation in Web services simplifies the integration in the communication level, at the higher levels of abstractions (e.g., services interfaces and protocol models) services are still open to heterogeneities. We characterise the mismatches between service interfaces and protocol specifications and introduce "mismatch patterns" to represent them. A mismatch pattern also includes an adapter template that aims at the resolution of the captured mismatch. We also propose semi-automated approaches for identifying the mismatches between interface and protocol specifications of two services. The proposed approaches have been implemented in prototype tools, and experimentally validated on synthetic and real-world datasets. The discovered process views, using PSDS, can be used to perform various analyses in an enterprise, and the proposed adaptation approach facilitates the adoption of Web services in business process integration.

The rapid advancement and penetration of information technology (IT), amid continued questions over its benefits, has resulted in research efforts to understand the extent to which IT resources contribute to organisational performance. There is little question that the presence of IT contributes to organisational performance. Our understanding of how and where IT contributes to value in organisations, however, is limited. Current IT business value research advances the notion that firm’s IT-related capabilities ability to leverage their IT resources explains the IT-related performance differences across firms. Understanding the nature of the IT-related capabilities, and their relationship with IT resources can provide a better understanding of how organisations can make better use of their IT resources. IT resources are dynamic and change at a rapid pace. Current IT business value research suggests the firm’s IT-related capabilities at a point in time can source value from the IT resources. However, firms IT-related capabilities must demonstrate parallel dynamics to maximise their influence on their IT resources. In this dynamic resource relationship environment, firm’s ability to sustain a level of influence on their IT resources will determine the extent of IT resources’ value-creating ability. Using the resource-based view of the firm that suggest an organisation is a bundle of resources, and using a complementary theoretical lens, this study introduces a higher-level resource, co-created by combining two or more complementary resources. This higher-level resource is capable of contributing to business value on its own, and importantly, can help organisations sustain their existing IT-related capabilities. The sustainable IT-related capabilities will have a better influence on the IT resources and will source better IT-related business value. This higher-level resource can also help with the timing of IT investments, and can provide an environment where a firm’s technical IT skills can better integrate the IT resources into the business processes. On measurement of organisational performance, this study suggests that a unique combination of organisational resources creates an efficient and effective internal environment that then becomes a powerful tool to enhance the key external process of customer service. Such enhancements in process-level efficiency and effectiveness will carry forward to be recognised in overall firm-level performance. This study develops and tests a model that assesses the association between the two generic IT resources (IT investment and technical IT skills), three IT-related capabilities (top management commitment, shared organisational knowledge, and flexible IT infrastructure), and internal process-level performance. It also assesses whether the IT-Usage Platform, a higher-level co-created resource, on its own associates with, and enhances the generic IT resources’ and IT-related capabilities’ association with internal process-level performance. The study also proposes that improvement in internal process-level performance will be positively associated with external process-level performance of customer service. Firms that improve their internal and external process performance should also improve their firm-level performance. The results, as hypothesised, failed to reject the non-association between the generic IT resources and the internal process-level performance. The study, as predicted, found a positive association between the three IT-related capabilities, IT-Usage Platform, and the internal process-level performance. The IT-Usage Platform indeed enhances the association between the IT-related capabilities and internal process-level performance. The results also suggest that the association between the technical IT skills and internal process-level performance improves in the presence of the IT-Usage Platform. Firms’ improved internal process-level performance also relates to improvement in external process-level performance. Improvement in the internal-external process performance also contributes to performance at the firm level. For research, this study demonstrates that the complementarity and the resource-based view theories allow inclusion of a greater variety of resources in a bundle of capable resources that could be a source of IT-related business value. The complementary theoretical lens also enables one to consider firms’ higher-level resources, co-created from complementary resources. The result is a robust model with the flexibility to consider other forms of resource interactions that sustain firms existing IT-related capabilities. The model also enables comparison of IT and other organisational resources on a level-platform and allows for a deeper understanding of how organisations can better leverage their IT resources. The study also presents the internal-external coordination path of IT-related value creation. For decision makers this study reinforces the importance of the concept of a coordinated IT-related change to secure value from their IT investments. It also presents decision makers with a visual IT business value path from internal process benefits to external process benefits, and finally to firm-level benefits. This study suggests all organisational resources, through various combinations, could be a source of IT-related business value. Future research can consider resources that are at the boundary of capable/non-capable resources to evaluate whether firms various resource arrangements can make these resources more valuable in sourcing IT-related business value. This research also provides strong theoretical arguments to consider other higher-level factors that may have the potential to sustain firms existing IT-related capabilities.

In recent years businesses around the world have been facing the challenges of a rapidly changing business and technology environment. As a result, organisations are paying more attention to supporting business process management by adapting to the dynamic environment. With the increased complexity and uncertainty in business operations, adaptive and collaborative business process and exception management (EM) are gaining attention. In the logistics industry, the growing importance of logistics worldwide as well as the increasing complexity of logistics networks and the service requirement of customers has become a challenge. The current logistics exceptions are managed using human brain power together with the traditional workflow technology-based supply-chain management or other logistics tools. The traditional workflow technology models and manages business processes and anticipated exceptions based on predefined logical procedures of activities from a centralised perspective. This situation offers inadequate decision support for flexibility and adaptability in logistics EM. The traditional workflow technology is also limited to monitoring the logistics activities in real-time to detect and resolve exceptions in a timely manner. To mitigate these problems, an intelligent agent incorporating business activity monitoring (BAM) decision support approach in logistics EM has been proposed and investigated in this research. This research creates and evaluates two IT designed artefacts (conceptual framework and prototype) intended to efficiently and automatically monitor and handle logistics exceptions. It follows a design science research strategy. The design, development, and evaluation adhere to the principles enunciated in the design science literature. The aim of this research is to solve the important logistics EM problem in a more effective and efficient manner. Two designed artefacts were strictly informed by, and incorporated with, three different theories. An exploratory case study and a later confirmatory case study assisted in the rigorous derivation of the design and framework. The results of the confirmatory case study were used in particular to refine the designed artefacts. Such a build-and-evaluate loop iterated several times before the final designed artefacts were generated. The designed artefacts were then evaluated empirically via a field experiment. The research included both a technical presentation and a practical framing in terms of application in the logistics exception monitoring and handling domain. In this study, there were three interrelated research phases. In the first research phase, a decision-making conceptual framework (an artefact) for design and development of real-time logistics EM system was developed. To enable more efficient decision support practices for logistics EM, the characteristics of logistics exceptions were first examined and identified. The logistics exception analysis was conducted through a comprehensive literature review and an exploratory case study conducted in a major logistics company in Australia. The logistics exceptions were then classified into known and knowable categories, based on the Cynefin sense-making framework (Snowden, 2002). On the basis of the logistics analysis, informed by Gartner’s three-layer BAM architecture (Dresner, 2003), the Cynefin sense-making framework decision models (Snowden, 2002), and Simon’s (1977) decision-making/problem-solving process, the real-time logistics EM conceptual framework was depicted. The BAM architecture provided the real-time decision support. Based on Cynefin’s decision model, adaptive business process flow was chosen for known and knowable logistics exceptions to speed up the decision-making process. In addition, Simon’s process theory was deployed to model the diagnosing process for known and knowable logistics exceptions. This conceptual model guided the analysis, design, and development for real-time logistics EM systems. In the second research phase, based on the logistics EM conceptual framework, a Web-service-multi-agent-based real-time logistics EM system (an artefact) was designed and developed. Intelligent agent technology was applied to deal with the complex, dynamic, and distributed logistics EM processes. Web-services techniques were proposed for more interoperability and scalability in network-based business environment. By integrating agent technology with Web-services to make use of the advantages from both, this approach provided a more intelligent, flexible, autonomous, and comprehensive solution to real-time logistics EM. In the third research phase, two designed artefacts were evaluated via a confirmatory case study and a field experiment. The confirmatory case study was conducted to collect feedback on the two designed artefacts (i.e., conceptual framework and prototype system) to refine them. The field experiment was then conducted to investigate the proposed logistics EM prototype system decision support effectiveness and efficiency by comparing the human decision-making performance with/without the logistics EM decision support facility. The evaluation results indicated that the proposed logistics EM prototype outperformed the one without logistics EM decision support in terms of more efficient decision process, higher decision outcome quality, and better user perception. The two designed artefacts were the major contributions of this research. They add knowledge to decision theory and practice. The artefacts are the real-time extension for Simon’s (1977) classic decision-making/problem-solving process model in logistics EM by incorporating BAM (Dresner, 2003). In addition, by adding the Cynefin sense-making framework (Snowden, 2002), the artefacts provide a more efficient decision-making routine for logistics EM. This research provides the first attempt (to the best of the researcher’s knowledge) to design a real-time logistics EM decision support mechanism based on decision science theories. To demonstrate the usability of the proposed conceptual framework, a logistics EM decision support prototype was designed, developed, and evaluated. For practice, the logistics exceptions classification, logistics EM conceptual framework, and incorporating agent technologies into logistics EM all will assist logistics companies to develop their logistics exception handling decision-making strategies and solutions.

In recent years businesses around the world have been facing the challenges of a rapidly changing business and technology environment. As a result, organisations are paying more attention to supporting business process management by adapting to the dynamic environment. With the increased complexity and uncertainty in business operations, adaptive and collaborative business process and exception management (EM) are gaining attention. In the logistics industry, the growing importance of logistics worldwide as well as the increasing complexity of logistics networks and the service requirement of customers has become a challenge. The current logistics exceptions are managed using human brain power together with the traditional workflow technology-based supply-chain management or other logistics tools. The traditional workflow technology models and manages business processes and anticipated exceptions based on predefined logical procedures of activities from a centralised perspective. This situation offers inadequate decision support for flexibility and adaptability in logistics EM. The traditional workflow technology is also limited to monitoring the logistics activities in real-time to detect and resolve exceptions in a timely manner. To mitigate these problems, an intelligent agent incorporating business activity monitoring (BAM) decision support approach in logistics EM has been proposed and investigated in this research. This research creates and evaluates two IT designed artefacts (conceptual framework and prototype) intended to efficiently and automatically monitor and handle logistics exceptions. It follows a design science research strategy. The design, development, and evaluation adhere to the principles enunciated in the design science literature. The aim of this research is to solve the important logistics EM problem in a more effective and efficient manner. Two designed artefacts were strictly informed by, and incorporated with, three different theories. An exploratory case study and a later confirmatory case study assisted in the rigorous derivation of the design and framework. The results of the confirmatory case study were used in particular to refine the designed artefacts. Such a build-and-evaluate loop iterated several times before the final designed artefacts were generated. The designed artefacts were then evaluated empirically via a field experiment. The research included both a technical presentation and a practical framing in terms of application in the logistics exception monitoring and handling domain. In this study, there were three interrelated research phases. In the first research phase, a decision-making conceptual framework (an artefact) for design and development of real-time logistics EM system was developed. To enable more efficient decision support practices for logistics EM, the characteristics of logistics exceptions were first examined and identified. The logistics exception analysis was conducted through a comprehensive literature review and an exploratory case study conducted in a major logistics company in Australia. The logistics exceptions were then classified into known and knowable categories, based on the Cynefin sense-making framework (Snowden, 2002). On the basis of the logistics analysis, informed by Gartner’s three-layer BAM architecture (Dresner, 2003), the Cynefin sense-making framework decision models (Snowden, 2002), and Simon’s (1977) decision-making/problem-solving process, the real-time logistics EM conceptual framework was depicted. The BAM architecture provided the real-time decision support. Based on Cynefin’s decision model, adaptive business process flow was chosen for known and knowable logistics exceptions to speed up the decision-making process. In addition, Simon’s process theory was deployed to model the diagnosing process for known and knowable logistics exceptions. This conceptual model guided the analysis, design, and development for real-time logistics EM systems. In the second research phase, based on the logistics EM conceptual framework, a Web-service-multi-agent-based real-time logistics EM system (an artefact) was designed and developed. Intelligent agent technology was applied to deal with the complex, dynamic, and distributed logistics EM processes. Web-services techniques were proposed for more interoperability and scalability in network-based business environment. By integrating agent technology with Web-services to make use of the advantages from both, this approach provided a more intelligent, flexible, autonomous, and comprehensive solution to real-time logistics EM. In the third research phase, two designed artefacts were evaluated via a confirmatory case study and a field experiment. The confirmatory case study was conducted to collect feedback on the two designed artefacts (i.e., conceptual framework and prototype system) to refine them. The field experiment was then conducted to investigate the proposed logistics EM prototype system decision support effectiveness and efficiency by comparing the human decision-making performance with/without the logistics EM decision support facility. The evaluation results indicated that the proposed logistics EM prototype outperformed the one without logistics EM decision support in terms of more efficient decision process, higher decision outcome quality, and better user perception. The two designed artefacts were the major contributions of this research. They add knowledge to decision theory and practice. The artefacts are the real-time extension for Simon’s (1977) classic decision-making/problem-solving process model in logistics EM by incorporating BAM (Dresner, 2003). In addition, by adding the Cynefin sense-making framework (Snowden, 2002), the artefacts provide a more efficient decision-making routine for logistics EM. This research provides the first attempt (to the best of the researcher’s knowledge) to design a real-time logistics EM decision support mechanism based on decision science theories. To demonstrate the usability of the proposed conceptual framework, a logistics EM decision support prototype was designed, developed, and evaluated. For practice, the logistics exceptions classification, logistics EM conceptual framework, and incorporating agent technologies into logistics EM all will assist logistics companies to develop their logistics exception handling decision-making strategies and solutions.

Thesis (MScEng)-- Stellenbosch University, 2013. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Organizations formally define and document their business processes in order to properly understand them and to subsequently enable their continuous development, improvement and management. In order to formally define and document their business processes, organizations can use Business Process Modelling, which represents the design of graphical models that portray the business processes of organizations. It is however noted that it is difficult to select a suitable Business Process Modelling Technique in support of a specific application of Business Process Modelling. This is due to the considerable amount of existing Business Process Modelling Techniques, the inherent impact of their varying capabilities and the lack of formal measures that are available to support evaluations regarding their suitability for specific modelling applications. It is therefore considered appropriate to execute a research study that is aimed at the development and validation of a measurement framework that can be used to evaluate the suitability of Business Process Modelling Techniques for specific modelling applications. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Organisasies definieer en dokumenteer hulle besigheidsprosesse op ʼn formele wyse om hulle ordentlik te verstaan en gevolglik hulle deurlopende ontwikkeling, verbetering en bestuur te bemagtig. Ten einde die uitvoering van hierdie aktiwiteit aan te spreek, kan organisasies Besigheidsproses Modellering gebruik om grafiese modelle van hulle besigheidsprosesse te ontwerp. Daar word egter kennis geneem dat dit moeilik is om ʼn geskikte Besigheidsproses Modellering Tegniek te kies tes ondersteuning van ʼn spesifieke toepassing van Besigheidsproses Modellering. Dit is weens die groot hoeveelheid bestaande Besigheidsproses Modellering Tegnieke, die impak van hulle variërende vermoëns asook die gebrek aan formele maatstawwe wat gebruik kan word om hulle geskiktheid vir spesifieke modellering toepassings te evalueer. Dit lei tot die besluit om ‘n studie te voltooi wat gefokus is op die ontwikkeling en validasie van ʼn metings raamwerk wat gebruik kan word om die geskiktheid van Besigheidsproses Modellering Tegnieke vir spesifieke toepassings van Besigheidproses Modellering te evalueer.

Cette thèse a été réalisée dans le cadre du projet « Gestion et Optimisation de la Chaîne Documentaire », projet labellisé par le Pôle de compétitivité des Industries du Commerce. Le projet a pour but de concevoir et de développer un nouveau workflow et un outil d’aide à la décision. Ce système doit être capable de gérer et d’optimiser le flux complet dématérialisé de contrats reçus à COFIDIS.Nous présentons d’abord le framework retenu dans le cadre du projet pour modéliser et implémenter le workflow. En phase de conception BPMN a été choisi. Pour la partie développement, l’utilisation de BPEL a été préconisée pour implémenter et exécuter l'application finale (services web).Cependant la flexibilité offerte par BPMN peut conduire à des propriétés indésirables du processus telles que blocage et inaccessibilité. De plus, BPMN a été conçu pour fournir des modèles Orientés Process. Les données ou les ressources y sont donc peu représentées. En conséquence, l'analyse de performance sur un modèle BPMN est quasi inexistante.Afin de surmonter ces problèmes nous proposons d’insérer dans le framework deux nouvelles phases. Ces deux phases sont appliquées au modèle BPMN. La première est une phase de vérification et de validation et la deuxième une phase d'optimisation. Ces deux phases sont réalisées en transformant le modèle BPMN vers un langage formel. Notre choix dans ce travail a été d'utiliser les réseaux de Petri. Ce qui nous a permis de vérifier et de valider de bonnes propriétés du process. Quant à l’optimisation, nous avons défini une nouvelle variante du problème d’affectation (bin packing problem) et proposé une résolution à intégrer dans le processus d’aide à la décision / This thesis has been realized as a part of the project GOCD (French acronym for Management and optimization of document life cycle) and within the context of the French competitive cluster PICOM. The project aims to design and develop a new paperless workflow system and decision making tool to replace the current paper based system. The new workflow system must manage and optimize received credit demands at COFIDIS.The first part of this thesis presents and discusses a framework to model and implement workflow systems. The proposed framework allows more flexibility in workflow reengineering process and operational analysis for different business process. The proposed framework uses the most recent and promising language to model and execute workflow the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) and Business Process Execution Language (BPEL).The flexibility offered by BPMN can also lead to undesirable properties for business process such as deadlocks and unreachablity. More, BPMN notation was designed to model business process, and little consideration was concentrated to represent data and resources. As a result, carrying out performance analysis on a BPMN model is also limited.To overcome these problems, we propose two additional phases in the reengineering process. They are applied to the target BPMN model. The first phase is verification and validation and the second one is optimization. These two phases are realized by transforming the BPMN model to a formal language, Petri nets. As for optimization, a new variant of bin packing problem has been defined. And we propose to integrate its resolution in a decision making tool