A method has been created that addresses the issues that prohibit the conversion of product artifacts into a secure, efficient and reliable Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) environment. These issues include automatic import of data into a PLM system and revision control of such data. A test case is shown which specifically addresses these issues as they pertain to the management of both legacy and new engineering data in a PLM system.

Une entreprise doit être capable de décrire et de demeurer réactive face à un événement endogène ou exogène. Une telle flexibilité peut s'obtenir par la gestion des processus d'entreprise (Business Process Management - BPM). Lors d'une démarche BPM, différentes transformations interviennent sur les modèles de processus développés par l'analyste métier et l'expert en technologies de l'information. Un non-alignement se crée entre ces modèles hétérogènes lors de leurs manipulations : il s'agit du "fossé métier-TI" tel que décrit dans la littérature. L'objectif de notre travail est de proposer un cadre méthodologique permettant un meilleur pilotage des processus métier, afin de tendre vers un alignement systématique de leur modélisation à leur implémentation au sein du système cible. A l'aide de concepts issus de l'ingénierie d'Entreprise et des Systèmes d'Informations dirigée par les modèles et des TI, nous définissons une démarche générique assurant une cohérence intermodèle. Son rôle est de conserver et de fournir toutes les informations liées à la structure et à la sémantique des modèles. En permettant la restitution intégrale d'un modèle transformé au sens de l'ingénierie inverse, notre plateforme permet une synchronisation entre modèle d'analyse et modèle d'implémentation. Le manuscrit présente également l'adéquation possible entre l'ingénierie des procédés et le BPM à travers un point de vue multi-échelle. / A company must be able to describe and to remain responsive against endogenous or exogenous events. Such flexibility can be obtained with the Business Process Management (BPM). Through a BPM approach, different transformations operate on process models, developed by the business analyst and IT expert. A non-alignment is created between these heterogeneous models during their manipulation: this is the "business-IT gap" as described in the literature. The objective of our work is to propose a methodological framework for a better management of business processes in order to reach a systematic alignment from their modelling to their implementation within the target system. Using concepts from Model-driven Enterprise and Information System engineering, we define a generic approach ensuring an intermodal consistency. Its role is to maintain and provide all information related to the model structure and semantics. By allowing a full restitution of a transformed model, in the sense of reverse engineering, our platform enables synchronization between analysis model and implementation model. The manuscript also presents the possible match between process engineering and BPM through a multi- erspective scale.

This thesis focuses on modeling of business processes which are very sensitive on correct capturing of process details characterized as process events and states. At the beginning of the analysis are the process events and states classified into three types: activity related, object related and time related. Each type is analyzed in detail and there are formulated states and their transitions that form a lifecycle of each individual type of the process state. There are discussed contemporary process modeling languages starting from the very popular to relatively less known, all representing slightly different approach towards process modeling. The analysis of process events and states shows that the contemporary process modeling languages cover the defined lifecycles only partially. There are picked three popular process modeling languages and put through a test case, which is based on Czech regulation of a building process. This test case allows us to review their capabilities to capture the process events including the ways how they get along with their only partial support. Upon analysis of process events and states and the unsatisfying results of the con-temporary process modeling languages in the test case, there is introduced a new process modeling language which, as demonstrated, is capable of capturing many of the process events and states in the test case in much simpler and precise way that the three reviewed process modeling languages were able to.

Business Process (BP) design reflects managerial needs and may directly influence business performance. A good design could substantially increase managerial performance, while a bad one would be inefficient, lack of flexibility, mess cost effective and eventually miss the business strategy. The widespread of information technology has raised the need to redesign or modify business processes in order to fit the trend of automation and computerization. As a result, business process reengineering (BPR) has gained much attention in 1990s. In recent years, a new paradigm, called Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME), becomes a new management innovation. Service process design becomes a new science that can be applied to support service innovation and management. Previous research on BPR includes two major directions: one focuses on managerial aspects of business processes, including the planning, implementation, and critical factors of BPR; the other focuses on the design aspects pf business processes with a target of making processes more efficient. For research on process design, most deal with the syntactic structure of the process. They analyze the syntax structure of a process. This can help find design errors such as deadlocks, livelocks, and even infinite loops in a process. Not many studies have investigated whether a process design meets its managerial goals. This research presents a knowledge-based approach to dealing with the managerial issue of whether a process design matches specific managerial goals. This thesis contains a new business process modeling method that allows a business process to be diagnosed by knowledge-based rules. We have defined three managerial goals in process design: effectiveness, efficiency, and flexibility. Each activity in a business process has its goal. Through the analysis of activities and their associated goals, we can determine whether a business process is properly designed. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed approach, we have implemented a JAVA-based prototype expert system and used it to check two sample business processes. The contributions of the study are two-fold. Academically, it proposed a new approach for business process diagnosis, which can help determine whether a process meets its managerial goal. In practice, businesses can use the concepts developed in the thesis to make their business processes more effective by matching activities with intended managerial goals.

This thesis study proposes a method for organizations to perform business process modeling in a decentralized and concurrent manner. The Plural method is based on the idea that organizations&rsquo / processes can be modeled by individuals actually performing the processes. Instead of having a central and devoted group of people to understand, analyze, model and improve processes, individuals are held responsible to model and improve their own processes concurrently. These individual models are then integrated to form organization&rsquo / s process network. The method guides the application of this approach in organizations with the activities to be followed and the artifacts to be produced. To apply the method, the study also introduces a notation and a prototype toolset. A multiple-case study involving two cases is conducted in order to evaluate the applicability of the method for decentralized process modeling and validate the expected benefits.

Siekiant korektiškai apibrėžti ilgai trunkantį paslaugomis pagrįstą verslo procesą, būtina specifikuoti šiuos proceso parametrus: duomenų srautus, verslo partnerius ir jų vykdomus veiksmus, proceso būsenų kaitą bei metodus ilgai trunkančioms transakcijos kompensuoti. Tai gali būti atliekama unifikuojant SAGA ir komunikacinių kilpų modelius. Siekiant aiškumo, pasiūlyti du griežtos formos diagramų tipai. Pateikto formalaus metamodelio pagrindu realizuotas grafinio redaktoriaus prototipas, skirtas modeliuoti paslaugomis pagrįstus procesus. Bandymu metu redaktoriumi sukurti eksperimentiniai verslo procesų modeliai. / To define long-running, service-oriented business process fully and correctly, it is necessary to specify following properties: data flows, business partners along with their actions, and state dynamics of entire process. Also, it is required to define mechanics which can be used to compensate failed long-running transactions. This can be achieved by combining SAGA and Communicative Action Loop models. To gain robustness, it was suggested to use two types of strictly formatted diagrams. A formal metamodel was proposed as a basis for a graphical editor which can be used to define a service-oriented business process and its properties. Finally, a prototype of graphical editor was developed and used to specify example business processes.

Context. How end user development can be enabled and made attainable through the use of a web based graphical user interface, in systems that contains logic for handling BPMN flows as variation points. Investigated from a UX and usability perspective. Objectives. Designing prototypes of such a web-based interface, and then evaluating the usability with regards to the usability attributes effectiveness and learnability, with the goal finding relevant usability issues & solutions as well as investigating how the two usability attributes affected the participants’ subjective satisfaction. Methods. Two prototype versions were implemented, one based upon the other. A usability inspection (expert evaluation) was performed after the first prototype version (named alpha) was finished and the second version (named beta) was built based on that feedback. The usability of the prototypes were then evaluated in usability test sessions using the think aloud method together with the SUS (System Usability Scale) questionnaire.The recorded data from the usability test sessions was analysed. Usability issues & solutions were noted, filtered, tagged and grouped by design principle with the goal of looking for patterns. SUS scores were calculated from the questionnaires. Additional factor analysis was performed on the SUS data to get separate usability and learnability scores. Results. The results consisted of SUS scores for both prototypes together with learnability and usability scores. Common and noteworthy usability issues & solutions grouped by design principle. Detailed appendixes with scenarios exemplifying recorded video & voice data for four of the most relevant test participants. Conclusions. The two prototypes were compared. Improvements to effectiveness and learnability was found to have a positive impact on the participants’ subjective satisfaction in the described context. Additionally, a number of usability issues and solutions was identified that could be of value when developing similar software. In summary, the following findings were made related to effectiveness: Adding constraints to the number of options available to users helped increase effectiveness. The lack of keyboard shortcuts was a deal breaker for many users and had a negative impact on effectiveness.. Consistency in navigation was more important than expected. The lack of functionality for saving drafts in the browser, without downloading, was something that most users expected and was surprised not to find. Several users expected their drafts to be automatically saved. They were frustrated when their changes were lost without warning. The lack of an undo function was also a big issue for users, causing problems with recovery. Giving immediate feedback with a notification popup after users had deployed a flow worked well and was easier to implement than expected. The connection tool that ship with bpmn-js was hard to learn and use for several users. Additionally, some learnability related findings: Sandbox intended to boost learnability but caused problems with effectiveness. The BPMN notation was not familiar to the test participants. Some training or introduction would have been necessary in a real usage scenario. When important functionality was concealed in submenus it was harder for users to learn how to operate the editor, specifically a problem with the context pad. Properties panel. Issues with visibility of single items due to tabs being too cluttered. Affordance issues on input/output parameters tab. Consistency issue with the bpmn.io logo being placed in the where users expected a save button. Consistency. Negative impact on learnability due to lack of keyboard shortcuts. Users likely to learn faster if they could use the shortcuts they already know. Placement of the download button not consistent with other webapps. Unconventional to only have drag and drop for upload and no button. Issues with visibility and consistency related to maximizing/minimizing editor in beta prototype. Familiarity findings related to deploy button colour and label might have affected learnability.

Made available in DSpace on 2015-04-11T14:02:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Sergio Roberto Costa Vieira.pdf: 3218639 bytes, checksum: 3935b43e35cc99b70f873c5ddb6e1882 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2012-07-18 / This thesis presents a requirements elicitation technique guided by business processes modeling. This technique, called REMO (Requirements elicitation by oriented Business Process Modeling), uses a set of heuristics to extract the software requirements from business process diagrams. The purpose of the technique is to aid systems analysts in the identification of functional requirements, non-functional requirements, and business rules. To accomplish such task, the REMO technique uses business process diagrams created using the BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation) notation. This thesis describes how the REMO technique was created and evaluated using an empirical-based research method. Furthermore, we present the analyses of the results obtained through three controlled experiments, which showed evidence that the REMO technique may be considered useful to be applied in software development during a requirements elicitation. / Esta dissertação apresenta uma técnica de elicitação de requisitos orientada pela modelagem de processos de negócios. A técnica de elicitação é denominada como REMO (Requirements Elicitation oriented by business process MOdeling), uma técnica que utiliza um conjunto de heurísticas para extrair os requisitos de software a partir dos diagramas de processos de negócios. O propósito da técnica é apoiar os analistas de sistemas na identificação dos requisitos funcionais, não funcionais e regras de negócios a partir dos diagramas de processos de negócios feitos em BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). Esta dissertação descreve como a técnica REMO foi elaborada e avaliada por meio de um método de pesquisa baseado em experimentação. Além disso, apresentam-se as análises dos resultados obtidos de três estudos experimentais controlados, que apontaram indícios de que a técnica REMO pode ser considerada útil para ser aplicada no desenvolvimento de software durante a elicitação de requisitos.

The subject of my thesis is the optimization of selected business processes in the specific company. These are processes, which optimization will lead to save time, money and will generate additional income and increase the current level of profit significantly. In my thesis, I proposed several indicators of metrics and describe new information systems that will be part of optimized processes. In the first part I present the theoretical aspects and the transition from functional to process management, modeling based on different methodologies, standards and measuring the performance of individual processes. In the next chapter I am dealing with the practical application of theoretical knowledge on a specific company. First I briefly introduce this company, define its position in the market, and going through complex of strategic analysis. Next I give solution how to find out the problematic aspects of the most critical processes and then I suggest optimization. An important part of this thesis are suggested metrics and indicators for these metrics, which are monitored and evaluate targets of each individual process and thus his successful implementation. After incorporating the proposed optimization, the company has significantly shifted not only in monitored metrics, but will also increase its value. These ideas I will summarize in the end of the work.

The correctness of a workflow specification is critical for the automation of business processes. For this reason, errors in the specification should be detected and corrected as early as possible - at specification time. In this paper, we present a validation method for workflow specifications using model-checking techniques. A formalized workflow specification, its properties and the correctness requirements are translated into a timed state machine that can be analyzed with the Uppaal model checker. The main contribution of this paper is the use of timed model checking for verifying time-related properties of workflow specifications. Using only one tool (the model checker) for verifying these different kinds of properties gives an advantage over using different specialized algorithms for verifying different kinds of properties.