El texto completo de este trabajo no está disponible en el Repositorio Académico UPC por restricciones de la casa editorial donde ha sido publicado. / In the today’s market, there is a wide range of failed IT projects in specialized small and medium-sized companies because of poor control in the gap between the business and its vision. In other words, acquired goods are not being sold, a scenario which is very common in tourism retail companies. These companies buy a number of travel packages from big companies and due to lack of demand for these packages, they expire, becoming an expense, rather than an investment. To solve this problem, we propose to detect the problems that limit a company by re-engineering the processes, enabling the implementation of a business architecture based on sentimental analysis, allowing small and medium-sized tourism enterprises (SMEs) to make better decisions and analyze the information that most possess, without knowing how to exploit it. In addition, a case study was applied using a real company, comparing data before and after using the proposed model in order to validate feasibility of the applied model. / Revisión por pares

El presente trabajo de investigación, tiene como objetivo, disminuir el tiempo de retraso en la entrega de obras de construcción. Cabe mencionar que estos retrasos ocasionan pérdidas y penalidades a la empresa e insatisfacción por parte del cliente. El estudio se basa en desarrollar un método de mejora integral a las áreas de calidad, planificación y procura. Para ello, se detalla la situación actual de la empresa, luego se establecen mejoras a tratar a partir de las causas de los problemas identificados y de esta manera obtener beneficios económicos para la empresa. Se inicia el trabajo de investigación desarrollando un marco teórico sobre la situación del rubro de construcción y las herramientas y metodologías a emplear, estos ayudarán a entender el contenido del informe. Posteriormente, se describe la situación actual de la empresa, cómo se encuentra organizada, sus unidades de negocio, misión y visión. Por último, se identifican las causas principales de los problemas de las áreas anteriormente mencionadas. A partir de los problemas identificados, se trabajarán las propuestas de mejoras, las cuales se enfocan en la implementación de las herramientas Business Process Management (BPM), Last Planner (LP) y Visual Management (VM). Evaluando los tiempos de trabajo en una obra realizada en el año 2018 como indicadores para evaluar las posibilidades y poder tomar decisiones a partir de ello mediante la simulación. Finalmente, este trabajo de investigación busca beneficios económicos mediante la reducción del pago de gastos y penalidades a la empresa mediante la información obtenida del sistema simulado. La metodología BPM reduce un 30% de tiempo a las actividades que se encuentran asociadas, el LP un 15.57% y VM un 33.3%. Por otra parte, el ahorro en pérdidas y penalidades en un escenario conservador equivale un 22.13%. / The purpose of this research work is to reduce the time of delay in the delivery of work. It should be mentioned that delays cause losses and penalties to the company. This study is based on developing a method of integral improvement to the areas of quality, planning and procurement. The current situation of the company is detailed, then improvements are established to deal with the causes of identified problems and thus obtain economic benefits for the company. The research work begins by developing a theoretical framework on the situation of the construction sector and the tools and methodologies to be used; these will help understand the content of the report. Subsequently, the current situation of the company is described: how it is organized, its business units, mission and vision. The main causes of the problems in the aforementioned areas are identified. Based on the problems identified, proposals for improvements will be worked on, which focus on the implementation of Business Process Management (BPM), Last Planner System (SLP) and Visual Management (VM) tools. Evaluating the work times in a work carried out in 2018 as indicators, this study evaluates the possibilities and is able to make decisions from them through simulation. Finally, this research work seeks economic benefits by reducing the payment of expenses and penalties to the company through the information obtained from the simulated system. The BPM methodology reduces the associated activities by 30% of time, the LP 15.57% and VM 33.3%. On the other hand, the savings in losses and penalties in a conservative scenario are equivalent to 22.13%. / Trabajo de Suficiencia Profesional

A key component of defense acquisition programs operating using the Integrated Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Life Cycle Management System is the reliance on the triple constraints of cost, schedule, and performance. While the use of Modeling and Simulation tools and capabilities is prevalent and well established in the Research and Development, Analysis, and Training domains, acquisition programs have been reluctant to use Modeling and Simulation in any great depth due to inaccessibility of tools, Subject Matter Experts, and implications to cost and schedule. This presents a unique Simulation Management challenge which requires an in-depth understanding of the technical capabilities available within an organization, their applicability to support immediate needs, and the flexibility to utilize these capabilities within the programmatic environment to provide a value added service. The focus of this dissertation is to study the use of Modeling and Simulation in the Defense arena, and to review the applicability of Modeling and Simulation within programmatic acquisition environments which are constrained by cost, schedule, and performance. This research draws comparisons between Modeling and Simulation to other Process Improvement initiatives, such as Lean and Six Sigma, and reviews case studies involving the application of Modeling and Simulation within triple constrained environments. The development of alternate scenarios allows cost benefit analysis to be conducted for each scenario and alternate scenario, developing a case for whether or not the application of Modeling and Simulation within the triple constrained environment delivered any consequential benefit to the acquisition process. Observations are made regarding the level of Modeling and Simulation as applied within each case study, and generalized recommendations are made for the inclusion of cost benefit iv analysis methodologies for analyzing proposed Modeling and Simulation activities within acquisition programs. Limitations and shortcomings of the research activity are discussed, along with recommendations for potential future work in the Simulation Management field, both with respect to the specific case studies reviewed in this study and the general field.

Real-world processes often undergo improvements to meet certain goals, such as coping with changed requirements, eliminating defects, improving the quality of the products, and reducing costs. Identifying and evaluating the defects or errors in the process, identifying the causes of such defects, and validating proposed improvements all require careful analysis of the process.Human-intensive processes, where human contributions require considerable domain expertise and have a significant impact on the success or failure of the overall mission, are of particular concern because they can be extremely complex and may be used in critical, including life-critical, situations. To date, the analysis support for such processes is very limited. If done at all, it is usually performed manually and can be extremely time-consuming, costly and error-prone.There has been considerable success lately in using static analysis techniques to analyze hardware systems, software systems, and manufacturing processes. This thesis explores how such analysis techniques can be automated and employed to effectively analyze life-critical, human-intensive processes. In this thesis, we investigated two static analysis techniques: Finite-State Verification (FSV) and Fault Tree Analysis (FTA). We proposed a process analysis framework that is capable of performing both FSV and FTA on rigorously defined processes. Although evaluated for processes specified in the Little-JIL process definition language, this is a general framework independent of the process definition language. For FSV, we developed a translation-based approach that is able to take advantage of existing FSV tools. The process definition and property to be evaluated are translated into the input model and property representation accepted by the selected FSV tool. Then the FSV tool is executed to verify the model against the property representation. For FTA, we developed a template-based approach to automatically derive fault trees from the process definition. In addition to showing the feasibility of applying these two techniques to processes, much effort has been put on improving the scalability and the usability of the framework so that it can be easily used to analyze complex real-world processes. To scale the analysis, we investigated several optimizations that are able to dramatically reduce the translated models for FSV tools and speed up the verification. We also developed several optimizations for the fault tree derivation to make the generated fault tree much more compact and easier to understand and analyze. To improve the usability, we provided several approaches that make analysis results easier to understand. We evaluated this framework based on the Little-JIL process definition language and employed it to analyze two real-world, human-intensive processes: an in-patient blood transfusion process and a chemotherapy process. The results show that the framework can be used effectively to detect defects in such real-world, human-intensive processes.

No description available.

Yes / Competition in the manufacturing industry is growing at an accelerated rate due to globalization trend. This global competition urges manufacturing organizations to review and improve their processes in order to enhance and maintain their competitive advantage. One of those initiatives is the implementation of the Six Sigma methodology to analyze and reduce variation hence improving the processes of manufacturing organizations. This paper presents a Discrete Event Simulation methodology to support a Six Sigma approach for manufacturing organizations. Several approaches to implement Six Sigma focus on improving time management and reducing cycle time. However, these efforts may fail in their effective and practical implementation to achieve the desired results. Following the proposed methodology, a Discrete Event Simulation model was built to assist decision makers in understanding the behavior of the current manufacturing process. This approach helps to systematically define, measure and analyze the current state process to test different scenarios to improve performance. The paper is amongst the first to offer a simulation methodology to support a process improvement approach. It applies an action research strategy to develop and validate the proposed modelling methodology in a British manufacturing organization competing in global markets.

Despite intense and wide-spread research in both virtual environments (VEs) and usability, the exciting new technology of VEs has not yet been closely coupled with the important characteristic of usability --- a necessary coupling if VEs are to reach their full potential. Although numerous methods exist for usability evaluation of interactive computer applications, these methods have well-known limitations, especially for evaluating VEs. Thus, there is a great need to develop usability evaluation methods and criteria <i>specifically</i> for VEs. Our goal is to increase awareness of the need for usability engineering of VEs and to lay a scientific foundation for developing high-impact methods for usability engineering of VEs. The first step in our multi-year research plan has been accomplished, yielding a comprehensive multi-dimensional taxonomy of usability characteristics specifically for VEs. This taxonomy was developed by collecting and synthesizing information from literature, conferences, World Wide Web (WWW) searches, investigative research visits to top VE facilities, and interviews of VE researchers and developers. The taxonomy consists of four main areas of usability issues: <i> Users and User Tasks in VEs</i>, <i>The Virtual Model</i>, <i>VE User Interface Input Mechanisms</i>, and <i>VE User Interface Presentation Components</i>. Each of these issues is progressively disclosed and presented at various levels of detail, including specific usability suggestions and context-driven discussion that include a number of references. The taxonomy is a thorough classification, enumeration, and discussion of usability issues in VEs that can be used by VE researchers and developers for usability assessment or simply design. The author can be reached through <a href=http://csgrad.cs.vt.edu/~jgabbard/>http://csgrad.cs.vt.edu/~jgabbard/</a> / Master of Science

The Business Process Management (BPM) lifecycle consists of four phases: design and analysis, configuration, enactment, and evaluation - also known as performance analysis and improvement. Performance analysis and improvement of business processes, one of the core phases in the BPM life cycle, is becoming on top of the agenda for many enterprises. An emerging approach to that is to use the business intelligence approaches that attempt to facilitate the analytical capabilities of business process management systems by implementing process-oriented data warehouse and mining techniques. However, little work has been has done on developing core methods and tools for performance analysis and improvement of business processes. In particular, adequate methods, clearly defined steps or instructions that can guide process managers for analyzing and improving processes using process warehouse (PW) are not available. In the absence of such methods, guidelines or clearly defined steps, important steps may be ignored and credible improvements steps cannot be taken. This research addresses the described limitations by developing a method for performance analysis and improvement of business processes. The key feature of the developed method is, it employs business-orientation in the design and utilization of a PW. The method is composed of three steps, building goal-structure, integrating goal-structure with PW, and analyzing and improving business processes. During the first step, a set of top-level performance goals are identified for the process of interest. Subsequently, the identified  goals are decomposed to generate a goal-structure that is aligned with the functional decomposition of the process of interest. The second step describes a technique for integrating the generated goal-structure with PW. The third step describes, a performance estimation model, a decision model and a step by step approach that focuses on utilizing PW for analysis and improvement of business processes. In order to facilitate the use of the proposed method a prototype is developed. The prototype offers a graphical user interface for defining goal structure, integrating goals with PW, and goal-based navigation of PW. In order to evaluate the proposed method, we first develop an evaluation framework and subsequently use it for the evaluation of the proposed method. The framework consists of three components, each representing a type of evaluation. The components are, methodological-structure evaluation, performance-based evaluation and perception-based evaluation. The results of the evaluation show partial support for the methodological structure. However, the results of performance and perception evaluation show promising results of the proposed method. / <p>QC 20121217</p>

Nearly 70% of process improvement projects are failing to provide the expected benefits (Grant 2002). The cost of process improvement projects can be quite substantial and the number of these projects occurring within organisations continues to increase. John Thorp (1998) describes an environment in which managers are struggling to demonstrate the connection between costs and expected business benefits. This eighteen month master's research project has identified a gap in both the academic literature and the business practices of most organisations. This thesis aims to make explicit the selection of processes to improve and to provide the link between process objectives and organisational goals (Davenport 1993; Hammer and Champy 1993). Published literature, coupled with the experience of the research team, has resulted in the development of a targeting methodology for defining and ranking critical processes, and then selecting which of those critical processes to improve first. Although the research team believes that the methodology is applicable to many industries, the research was undertaken in the application hosting centre (AHC) and application service provision (ASP) industry. A focus group and follow on Delphi study was used to ensure that the processes and functional area focused upon was of importance to the participants of the research. This research project was funded by the Australian Research Council's Linkage projects and undertaken with support by REALTECH. The participants included the top three information systems outsourcing companies in Australia and another in the top ten of this industry. The study commenced with identifying critical processes in the ASP environment. This involved both a focus group session and a Delphi study. The Delphi study was followed by four action learning cycles using case studies (action, observe, reflect and revise). These action learning cycles using case studies have revealed that the methodology (which includes the steps to implement the methodology) meets the needs of organisations to identify and select 'critical' processes for improvement. It provides business and researchers with a logical and explicit method to reduce the 'squeaky wheel' and 'latest fad' approaches to process improvement projects. These prior approaches improve processes not necessarily critical for achieving organisational goals consuming limited resources for little gain. The targeting method makes the alignment of process objectives with goals by explicitly linking processes to organisational goals possible. The limitations of this research project are that it does not intend to verify the achievement of business benefit, document the change to an organisation due to its use of the targeting methodology or determine the long term benefits to an organisation using the targeting methodology. These questions might be answered in a longer and larger study as this project is limited to an eighteen month time frame. As for generalisability, the study has focused on the AHC and ASP industries, and the participants, while operating within this industry, are quite different. For the different phases of this project the participants come from in-house providers, multinational outsourcing providers, commercialised government providers, specialist niche product providers, and enterprise system suppliers.

<p> </p><p><strong>Degree Project Advanced Level - Business Administration, Linnaeus Business School at Linnaeus University, Business Process and Supply Chain Management, 4FE02E, Spring 2010.</strong></p><p> </p><p><strong>Authors:</strong> Muhammad Rizwan ul Haque, Ahmed Nawaz Shaikh, Kamonmarn Jaenglom, Zaheer Tariq</p><p><strong>Tutor:</strong> Petra Andersson</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Title: Supplier Selection Process Improvement through Six-Sigma DMAIC (A case of Lafarge Pakistan Cement Limited)</strong></p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Background: </strong>Cement industry is considered to be an intensive supplier base industry. Cement manufacturing involves several types of suppliers ranging from general utilities to large plant equipments. Also, supply chain performance is significant topic in many cement organisations. The supply chain department at Lafarge Pakistan Cement Limited (LPCL) wants to inspect and improve their supplier selection process. The intended objective of this inspection is two folded. First, LPCL wants to develop a competitive supplier base out of bulk suppliers available in the market that would result in competitive advantage over its competitors. Second, they want to improve their supplier selection process so that there would be low variance and exclusion of unnecessary activities that would ultimately help in achieving the cost, quality and service enhancement objectives.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Research question: </strong></p><p>How can the existing supplier selection process at Lafarge Pakistan Cement Limited (LPCL) be improved by applying Six-Sigma DMAIC?</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong>Methodology: </strong></p><p>This thesis is a descriptive case study and was conducted with a deductive approach. Data was collected through interviews, discussions and questionnaire. The scientific credibility of this thesis was secured by using many sources, avoidance of assumptions, studying a common process and following standardized steps of supplier selection.</p><p><strong>Conclusion:</strong></p><p>The existing process of supplier selection at LPCL was defined and mapped to understand the process characteristics and capabilities. The existing process was then analysed to identify problem areas, variations and unnecessary activities. Corrective actions were recommended to deal with problem areas and an improved supplier selection process for LPCL was suggested with process coordination and control measures.</p><p><strong>Suggestions for future research:</strong></p><p>Based on the findings of this thesis, we suggest that the further research for LPCL could be done in the area of sourcing and suppliers relationship management. Sourcing; a study could examine the sourcing policy at LPCL on purchasing practises of products. It would also be interesting to focus more on this area which leads to excellent cost reduction. Using scenario method could compare and analyse regional, national and worldwide sourcing. Supplier Relationship Management; a study could investigate supplier relationship management that leads to creating a competitive advantage for LPCL through the development of supplier performance monitoring and supplier development programme. More details could continuously move towards cost reduction, increased reliability and risk mitigation, transparency of supplier costs and quality, and enhanced efficiency of sourcing process.</p>