The objective of this thesis is to explore the design of operational processes in information-intensive service delivery systems. Empirical data is presented which builds upon existing literature within the Business Process Management (BPM) and Service Operations Management (SOM) disciplines. Adopting a theory building mode, the thesis concludes with the formulation of several research propositions which specify the design characteristics of the processes that provide the service concept to the customer. The research addresses a number of gaps in the literature. First, there is little empirical evidence concerning the relationship between the service concept, customer inputs, and process design. Second, service classification schemes promote homogeneous thinking in the design of service systems delivering diverse service concepts. Third, the BPM literature provides generic process design principles which offer limited theoretical insights into the design requirements of operational processes. Finally, there is a need for process design research in information-intensive service organisations. A research framework that integrates theoretical models addressing service process design is investigated using a single case study approach. Fieldwork was carried out over a sixteen-month period in a large electricity supplier in the UK. In contrast to the macro-orientation found within the literature, this study employs a more granular level of analysis to address the unique requirements of ‘service concept – processes’ pairs. This approach results in a number of important findings which, in several instances, are in contradiction to current thinking. First, the results empirically validate the theoretical relationship between service concept, customer inputs, and process design. Different service concepts lead to different process designs, and the more customised the service concept, the more the process is uniquely designed. Significant differences in the design of the individual processes that collectively provide the service concept to the customer are highlighted. The results also provide some new insights into the design of front office – back office activities as well as into the design characteristics of processes characterised by low customer contact. In addition, the study refutes the view that generic process design principles are universally applicable irrespective of the context in which the processes operate. Finally, the research findings show that a process-based view of service systems allows for heterogeneity; that is differences in the design of service delivery processes within the same organisation.

Ingeniero Civil en Computación / Hoy en día, el levantamiento de procesos de negocio es un mecanismo ampliamente difundido y utilizado para el entendimiento de reglas, problemáticas y características de empresas y su negocio. Hoy en día se identifican numerosos problemas asociados al levantamiento de procesos, muchos de los cuales tienen su origen en que el conocimiento sobre los procesos no esta formalizado y/o esta repartido entre diversos actores. Para enfrentar esto se existen varias técnicas que involucran el trabajo en terreno y la colaboración de varios participantes a la vez. El trabajo de esta memoria fue la construcción de una herramienta que apoye dichas técnicas, facilitando el trabajo del levantamiento y modelado en terreno y en forma colaborativa. Fue así como se construyó MOBIZ, aplicación que permite el trabajo concurrente de varios actores en el modelamiento de procesos a través de dispositivos móviles. Al ser construida HTML5, puede ser accedida desde casi cualquier dispositivo moderno común navegador, móvil o no. Entrega una interfaz diferenciada para equipos móviles y de escritorio, y gracias la creación del framework COUPLINGSERVER, se pudo abstraer completamente la aplicación misma de la comunicación con otros usuarios.

<p>U doktorskoj disertaciji su predstavljeni modeli za unapređenje<br />organizacione strukture i upravljanja poslovnim procesima i<br />upravljanje performansom poslovnih procesa. U prvom modelu su<br />razvijeni postupci analize, modelovanja, ocenjivanja i vrednovanja<br />postupaka unapređenja struktura i poslovnih procesa, a u drugom<br />modelu su postavljene faze planiranja, merenja i vizuelizacije<br />performansi poslovnih procesa. Primenjeni su savremeni softveri<br />za upravljanje procesima i njihovim performansama. Mogućnost<br />praktične primene razvijenih modela istražena je u dve studije<br />slučaja realnog idustrijskog uslužnog preduzeća.</p> / <p>In his doctoral dissertation, presented models for improving organizational<br />structures and business process management and performance<br />management business processes. In the first model developed methods of<br />analysis, modeling, assessment and evaluation procedures to improve the<br />structure and business processes, and in the second model are set phases<br />of planning, performance measurement and visualization of business<br />processes. Were applied modern software management processes and their<br />performance. A possible application of the developed model was investigated<br />in two case studies of real industrial service enterprise.</p>

Background: South Korea is one of the countries currently enforcing more strict emission standards for heavy-duty vehicles, as a result of the global push to restrict pollution. In addition, there has been recent scandals involving several well-established automotive companies manipulating emissions tests and not fulfilling regulations. This has resulted in the government increasing the pressure for companies to apply the correct certifications even further. For companies to sell vehicles on the South Korean market, the vehicles must be certified and approved by the government, known as homologation. This process partly involves self-certification, meaning that companies are responsible for applying the correct certification themselves. It is therefore of great importance to have structured and clear processes to mitigate risks of error-making, in order to avoid financial and legal repercussions. Purpose: The study aims to identify and analyze the risks in error-making. Therefore, the purpose is to understand and propose improvement actions to the current homologation processes at Scania Korea Group. Method: The thesis utilized a case study strategy with a descriptive approach to illustrate the process. An exploratory approach was used in combination to identify risks and provide improvement actions. Qualitative data in conjunction with theory around business process improvement were utilized to fulfill the purpose. Firstly, interviews and focus groups were conducted to map the process. Thereafter, a failure mode and effect criticality analysis(FMECA) was used to analyze the process. Lastly, improvement actions were decided based on best practices and benchmarking. Findings and recommendations: The homologation process contain many high severity risks such as certifying the incorrect truck specifications or not complying with regulations, due to not updating the certifications when product changes occur. Furthermore, government approvals incorporate a substantial part of the process lead-time. As such, it is concluded that quality is of utmost importance, both to decrease lead-time and minimize risks with detrimental consequences. The analysis showed evidence of lacking controls/gates in the process, which enables errors and incorrect applications to move through. Improvements regarding increased project structure, planning and communication within SKG were suggested. Further improvement points were an increased number of controls and more clear delegation of responsibility. Recommendations for future studies: We propose to further investigate the root-causes of the inherent risks in the process. Future studies should also look to gather additional data from other heavy-duty automotive companies in South Korea, since it could provide deeper and more generalizable results. Lastly, we recommend future research to utilize a quantitative research approach, providing more statistical evidence.

O gerenciamento de processos de negócios (Business Process Management - BPM) é uma abordagem de gestão cada vez mais utilizada pelas organizações para a operacionalização da estratégia devido a sua capacidade de geração de benefícios; contudo, há crescentes e elevados os índices de insucesso as iniciativas de promoção de BPM. Isso vem ocorrendo principalmente porque BPM vem tendo foco nos processos de negócios internos e não tem conseguido se ajustar com rapidez e flexibilidade para lidar com a dinâmica do ambiente de negócios. A agilidade é um elemento que ajuda a lidar com esses aspecto; tal como aconteceu com a manufatura e com o gerenciamento de projetos (que evoluíram para manufatura ágil e gerenciamento ágil de projetos, respectivamente) BPM vem tendo elevada demanda por agilidade, e um BPM Ágil se apresenta como uma evolução de BPM com elevado poder de contribuição para o tema. BPM Ágil traz o cliente para atuar de maneira ativa no processo e impõe uma flexibilidade para interação da operação com a dinâmica ambiental de maneira mais assertiva. Um gerenciamento é realizado por meio de Práticas (conjunto formado por técnicas, ferramentas e ações), de maneira que o presente estudo tem como principal objetivo propor Práticas para a promoção da BPM Ágil nas organizações. Para o alcance de novas iniciativas empíricas e avanços na teoria, este estudo se propõe a construir um novo conceito de BPM Ágil, uma nova definição e estabelecer as suas práticas. É fundamental que os processos de negócios alcancem seus objetivos produzindo respostas com rapidez e flexibilidade para mudanças, de modo que BPM Ágil deve aumentar a exploração e o aproveitamento de oportunidades. A proposição de Práticas para o BPM Ágil presente nesta tese é uma contribuição inicial que deve ajudar a desbravar um novo campo de estudos por meio de uma abordagem científica. Para tanto, foram utilizadas 7 abordagens metodológicas distintas para a elaboração deste estudo: revisão sistemática de literatura, análise indutiva, consulta a especialistas, análise de juízes, survey, painel de especialistas e mais dois estudos de caso. Como principal resultado tem-se 78 Práticas, sendo 23 técnicas, 13 ferramentas e 42 ações para a promoção do BPM Ágil / Business Process Management (BPM) is a management approach increasingly used by organizations to operationalize the strategy because of their ability to generate benefits; however, there are increasing and high failure rates for BPM promotion initiatives. This has been mainly because BPM has been focusing on internal business processes and has not been able to adjust quickly and flexibly to deal with the dynamics of the business environment. Agility is an element that helps deal with these aspects; as occurred with manufacturing and project management (which evolved to agile manufacturing and agile project management, respectively). BPM has been in high demand for agility, and an Agile BPM is an evolution of BPM with a high power of contribution for the theme. Agile BPM brings the client to act in an active way in the process and imposes a flexibility to interact the operation with the environmental dynamics more assertively. A management is carried out through Practices (a group formed by techniques, tools and actions), so that the main purpose of this study is to propose Practices for the promotion of Agile BPM in organizations. For the achievement of new empirical initiatives and advances in theory, this study proposes to build a new concept of Agile BPM, a new definition and establish its practices. It is critical that business processes reach their goals by producing responses with speed and flexibility for change, so that Agile BPM must increase exploration and se\'ize opportunities. The proposal of Practices for Agile BPM in this thesis is an initial contribution that should help to open up a new field of studies through a scientific approach. In order to do so, 7 different methodological approaches were used for the elaboration of this study: systematic literature review, inductive analysis, expert consultation, judges analysis, survey, panel of experts and two other case studies. As a main result there are 78 Practices, being 23 techniques, 13 tools and 42 actions for the promotion of Agile BPM

The current business environment is rapidly and fundamentally changing. The main driver are digital technologies. Companies face the pressure to exploit those technologies to improve their business processes in order to achieve competitive advantage. In the light of increased complexity of business processes and the existence of corporate Big Data stored in information systems, the discipline of process mining has emerged. Investigate how process mining can support the optimization of business processes. In this qualitative study, an illustrative case study research is utilized involving eight research participants. Hereby, data is primarily collected from semi-structured interviews. The data is analyzed using content analysis. In addition, the illustrative case serves the purpose to demonstrate the application of process mining. The research revealed that process mining has important impacts on current business process improvement. Not all of them were explicitly positive. The derived success factors should support vendors, current and potential users to apply process mining safe and successfully.

Nowadays, business processes are increasingly supported by IT services that produce massive amounts of event data during the execution of a process. These event data can be used to analyze the process using process mining techniques to discover the real process, measure conformance to a given process model, or to enhance existing models with performance information. Mapping the produced events to activities of a given process model is essential for conformance checking, annotation and understanding of process mining results. In order to accomplish this mapping with low manual effort, we developed a semi-automatic approach that maps events to activities using insights from behavioral analysis and label analysis. The approach extracts Declare constraints from both the log and the model to build matching constraints to efficiently reduce the number of possible mappings. These mappings are further reduced using techniques from natural language processing, which allow for a matching based on labels and external knowledge sources. The evaluation with synthetic and real-life data demonstrates the effectiveness of the approach and its robustness toward non-conforming execution logs.

La mondialisation, la croissance continuelle des tailles des entreprises et le besoin d'agilité ont poussé les entreprises à externaliser leurs activités, à vendre des parties de leurs procédés, voire même distribuer leurs procédés jusqu'à lors centralisés. En plus, la plupart des procédés métiers dans l'industrie d'aujourd'hui impliquent des interactions complexes entre un grand nombre de services géographiquement distribués, développés et maintenus par des organisations différentes. Certains de ces procédés, peuvent être très complexes et manipulent une grande quantité de données, et les organisations qui les détiennent doivent faire face à un nombre considérable d'instances de ces procédés simultanément. Certaines même éprouvent des difficultés à les gérer d'une manière centralisée. De ce fait, certaines entreprises approuvent le besoin de partitionner leurs procédés métiers d'une manière flexible, et être capables de les distribuer d'une manière efficace, tout en respectant la sémantique et les objectifs du procédé centralisé. Le travail présenté dans cette thèse consiste à proposer une méthodologie de décentralisation qui permet de décentraliser d'une manière optimisée, générique et flexible, des procédés métiers. En d'autres termes, cette approche vise à transformer un procédé centralisé en un ensemble de fragments coopérants. Ces fragments sont déployés et exécutés indépendamment, distribués géographiquement et peuvent être invoqués à distance. Cette thèse propose aussi un environnement pour la modélisation des chorégraphies de services web dans un langage formel à savoir le calcul d'événements. / In mainstream service orchestration platforms, the orchestration model is executed by a centralized orchestrator through which all interactions are channeled. This architecture is not optimal in terms of communication overhead and has the usual problems of a single point of failure. Moreover, globalization and the increase of competitive pressures created the need for agility in business processes, including the ability to outsource, offshore, or otherwise distribute its once-centralized business processes or parts thereof. An organization that aims for such fragmentation of its business processes needs to be able to separate the process into different parts. Therefore, there is a growing need for the ability to fragment one's business processes in an agile manner, and be able to distribute and wire these fragments together so that their combined execution recreates the function of the original process. This thesis is focused on solving some of the core challenges resulting from the need to restructure enterprise interactions. Restructuring such interactions corresponds to the fragmentation of intra and inter enterprise business process models. This thesis describes how to identify, create, and execute process fragments without loosing the operational semantics of the original process models. It also proposes methods to optimize the fragmentation process in terms of QoS properties and communication overhead. Further, it presents a framework to model web service choreographies in Event Calculus formal language.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-10T10:40:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Nivaldo Pereira de Morais Junior.pdf: 5984103 bytes, checksum: 3f61228afee9e7a089b878498fbfd064 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-03-11 / Este trabalho tem o intuito de avaliar o uso do Gerenciamento de Processos de Negócio (BPM) para melhoria dos processos da construção civil. Inicialmente é apresentado um estudo do panorama da construção civil e da gestão de processos construtivos no Brasil. Em seguida o trabalho ressalta a importância dos processos de negócio para as organizações e apresenta a disciplina BPM com suas principais características. Posteriormente, são discutidos conceitos e métodos que são fundamentais para aplicação do BPM como: gestão de indicadores, redução de desperdícios com a produção e construção enxuta e notação de modelagem. Com base na metodologia de Design Science Research, estes conceitos são utilizados para propor um método de intervenção. O método proposto é aplicado por meio de intervenção em uma empresa que atua na construção de casas populares no estado de Goiás dentro do programa do governo federal minha casa minha vida. Os resultados obtidos são confrontados com os fatores críticos de sucessos para iniciativas de BPM e apontam para a viabilidade do uso do método proposto possibilitando constatar a aplicação da gestão de processos de negócio em um ambiente real de negócios da construção civil, envolvendo a liderança da organização e os atores dos processos.

As técnicas de medição de complexidade funcional são facilmente encontradas na literatura, entretanto, o processo de avaliação dessas técnicas nem sempre são abordados, o que torna contestável sua validade. A técnica análise de pontos de processos de negócio (Business Process Points and Analisys -- BPPA) foi desenvolvida com o objetivo de adaptar a técnica Análise de Pontos de Função, da engenharia de software, a fim de ser aplicada no contexto de gestão de processos de negócio. A BPPA foi proposta para que gerentes de projetos possam estimar sistematicamente a complexidade funcional de um projeto de automação de processos de negócio, todavia, a técnica BPPA não foi submetida a um processo de avaliação consistente, capaz de apresentar seus benefícios e suas limitações. A avaliação da técnica BPPA é o objeto de estudo desta dissertação, que visa avaliar consistentemente sua capacidade de acurácia e reprodutibilidade, identificando suas limitações. Assim, esta dissertação apresenta a execução de um quase-experimento que objetivou avaliar a técnica BPPA em relação a sua capacidade de ser reprodutível e acurável. O quase-experimento foi realizado por 58 alunos de graduação e pós-graduação, selecionados por conveniência, que mensuraram a complexidade funcional de três modelos de processo de negócio, com o auxílio de materiais de apoio, após terem sido submetidos a um treinamento sobre as etapas de estimativa funcional da técnica BPPA. Os resultados obtidos com esse experimento apresentaram um baixa índice de acurácia e reprodutibilidade da técnica BPPA. Entrevistas semiestruturadas foram conduzidas com alguns dos sujeitos participantes do processo experimental, a fim de identificar as potenciais limitações do quase-experimento a que foram submetidos. As entrevistas foram conduzidas por meio de perguntas predefinidas com objetivo de extrair a percepção dos sujeitos em relação à técnica BPPA, ao processo experimental, ao relatório técnico, ao material de apoio, ao treinamento da estimativa da complexidade funcional dos pontos de processos de negócio e aos outros elementos observados pelos participantes. As entrevistas permitiram entender que os sujeitos identificaram pontos de falhas potenciais no processo como um todo, principalmente em relação a qualidade do relatório técnico, que descreve a técnica e as regras de sua aplicação / Functional size measurement techniques are easily found in the literature, however, the evaluation process of these techniques are not always approached which makes its validity questionable. The Business Process Points and Analyzes (BPPA) technique was developed with the objective of adapting the Functional Points Analysis (FPA) technique of software engineering, in order to be applied in the context of business process management. BPPA was proposed so that project managers can systematically estimate the functional size of a business process automation project, however, the technique was not submitted to a consistent evaluation process, capable of presenting its benefits and limitations. The evaluation of the BPPA technique is the object of study of this dissertation that aims to consistently evaluate its capacity for accuracy and reproducibility, identifying its limitations. Thus, this dissertation presents the execution of a quasi-experiment aimed to evaluate the technique in relation to its ability to be accurate and reproducible. The quasi-experiment was performed by 58 graduate and postgraduate students, selected by convenience, who measured the functional complexity of three business process models, with support materials aid, after having undergone training on the stages of functional estimation of the technique. The results obtained with this experiment presented the low accuracy and reproducibility of the BPPA technique. Semistructured interviews were conducted with some of the participating in the experimental process in order to identify the potential limitations of the quasi-experiment to which they were submitted. The interviews were conducted by means of pre-defined questions with the objective of extracting the participants perception regarding the technique, the experimental process, the technical report, the support material, the training of estimating the functional size and other elements observed by participants. The interviews allowed us to understand that the participant subjects identified potential failure points in the process as a whole, mainly in relation to the quality of the technical report of the BPPA technique, which describes the technique and the rules of its application