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.

Web developers are confronted with evaluating the usability of Web interfaces. Automatic Web usability evaluation tools are available, but they are limited in the types of problems they can handle. Tool support for manual usability evaluation is needed. Accordingly, this research focuses on developing a tool for supporting manual processes in Heuristic Evaluation inspection. The research was conveyed in three phases. First, an observational study was conducted in order to characterize the inspection process in Heuristic Evaluation. The videos of evaluators applying a Heuristic Evaluation on a non-interactive, paper-based Web interface were analyzed to dissect the inspection process. Second, based on the study, a tool for annotating Web interfaces when applying Heuristic Evaluations was developed. Finally, a survey is conducted to evaluate the tool and learn the role of annotations in inspection. Recommendations for improving the use of annotations in problem reporting are outlined. Overall, users were satisfied with the tool. The goal of this research, designing and developing an inspection tool, is achieved.

Despite the federal government’s $1.5 billion investment between 1993 and 2010 to fund 164 separate community-based systems of care, there has been an extremely limited attempt to measure the impact of system of care. The impetus for this research is the struggle for how the value based concept of system of care is communicated within a community. While child mental health services researchers have published a number of randomized control trials to explore individual level supports for youth served in a system of care community, researchers have struggled to devise a way to measure system of care philosophy diffusion. While system of care is a system level intervention, this study explored the role of the system of care value: family voice as it pertains to direct practice for children and families. The goal was to assess whether specific direct practices regularly associated with system of care (i.e., wraparound or home-based services) lead to greater family voice or if the mere presence of a high-functioning system of care community leads to equal family voice for all receiving community-based services. The primary finding was a relationship between the perception of family functioning and perceived empowerment/self-efficacy. This finding suggests that as functioning improves, so does a caregiver’s perception of their personal empowerment/ self-efficacy. While the framing of this study was to “unpack” the system of care value of family voice, the findings do not support any clear cut explanation for how family voice is promoted or communicated to families. Based on the findings, it appears as if families feel more empowered as their child improves. Additional research needs to be done on the application of family voice within the practice setting to better understand how to best instruct staff to infuse family voice in their daily practice.

Presented thesis entitled “Cleanliness of components management implementation” with analysis of the currently applied cleanliness management system in the organization, identification of the root causes of contamination in production, suggestion of the possible solution and recommendation of actions. All material presented in this thesis were collected in Mann+Hummel (CZ) s.r.o., a producer of filters and fluid circuits for automotive industry.

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this document / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Chemistry / unrestricted

The thesis is concerned with the implementation of a document management system (DMS) in a small firm where I've been working for almost 4 years as an information technician. The aim of the thesis is to implement the particular DMS product that is in this case an open system Alfresco. The project of the implementation itself is preceded by the firm analysis phase that includes a process analysis, an analysis of relevant documents as well as an economic analysis. Through this analysis series of inadequacies in work activities of individual employees were recognized and these are aimed to be minimized or eliminated with the help of the Alfresco system implementation. Within the scope of project stages description concerning the implementation of the Alfresco the thesis is focused especially on the analysis phases and solution design, the implementation, the customization and finally the operation. Throughout the above mentioned stages a new structure of some processes is suggested, including a change of the firm organization structure, furthermore basic functions of Alfresco system are described and a fundamental rules framework is defined to know how to use the Alfresco system in concrete cases. The end of the thesis contains an evaluation whether to apply the Alfresco system in a small firm or not and further a three-month's testing period and its influence on the firm is being discussed.

The subject of my dissertation is a process analysis of administration of Mortgage credit in G.E. Money bank Plc. The purpose of analysis is an improvement of selected process inside company. The theoretical part is dedicate to process analysis and corporate decision making process modeling.The practical part has two sections introduction of G.E Money bank Plc.basic description of Mortgage credit phases. The main part of my dissertation is a process analysis in G.E Money bank Plc. The analysis of present state, evaluation and improvement suggestion of selected processes is a main target of my work.

The topic of this thesis is the process analysis of the production company. The main goal is to describe, model and asses the recent status of processes. The additional goal is the measurements and recommendations proposal based on the evaluations. The process management is described in the introduction of the theory with subsequent explanation of methods and methodology of process modeling. The basic standards for process models creation is described in the next part of the thesis. The analyzed company will be introduced in the practical part of the paper and the method derived from the theoretical part will be applied. After modeling the recent status the necessary measures and changes will be introduced to eradicate the identified problems.

This thesis covers the process analysis in sales controlling department of an energy company from the point of view of effectiveness of information system support. Based on this analysis is provided evaluation of the system implementation. According to the importance of the practical part of the thesis, it is not divided from the theoretical part, but it penetrates the theory withint the whole thesis. the main scope of controlling and information system is first introduced in the beginning of the thesis, followed by the process description and its analysis. Conclusion includes all essential findings and evaluation of premilinary hypotesis.

This thesis deals with realization of process analysis of department of management and real estate managnement of a supermarket company. The goal of this work, addressed in the practical part, is to map the processes in terms of business process diagrams with description of these processes, identify potential inconsistencies and eventually recommend a revision of current documents. The theoretical part explains the concepts of process management, process, process analysis and procedure of mapping process. There are also described and evaluated basic methods and standards for process modeling.