Business process management (BPM) aims to optimize business processes to achieve better system performance such as higher profit, quicker response, and better services. BPM systems in Industry 4.0 ...are required to digitize and automate business process workflows and support the transparent interoperations of service vendors. The critical bottleneck to advance BPM systems is the evaluation, verification, and transformation of trustworthiness and digitized assets. Most of BPM systems rely heavily on domain experts or third parties to deal with trustworthiness. In this paper, an automated BPM solution is investigated to select and compose services in open business environment, Blockchain technology (BCT) is explored and proposed to transfer and verify the trustiness of businesses and partners, and a BPM framework is developed to illustrate how BCT can be integrated to support prompt, reliable, and cost-effective evaluation and transferring of Quality of Services in the workflow composition and management.
Despite the number and variety of business process modelling languages and notations available in the Business Process Management field, all of them mainly focus on a single type of relationship ...holding between business process activities, namely the activity execution order within the control flow. However, other types of relationships may hold between activities (e.g., co-occurrence or causal constraints) and the motivation behind these relationships can also be different (e.g., a norm or an ontological law-of-nature). In this paper, we focus on one type of these activity relationships whose semantics goes beyond the semantics of arrows in traditional business process modelling languages, i.e., on the so called occurrence dependences. In particular, we aim at evaluating whether making these occurrence dependences explicit in business process models could support business process modellers and analysts in their tasks. To this aim, we propose a notation for representing the occurrence dependences and their rationale, and carry out an empirical study with human subjects for evaluating their support in comprehension and redesign tasks; in addition, we qualitatively investigate the effort required for enriching business process models with these dependences.
•Other types of dependences among business process activities that go beyond the activity execution order.•A new notation for enriching business process models with activity dependences and their rationales.•An empirical evaluation with human subjects on activity dependences and their rationales.
Research studies provide evidence of large number of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects implementation failures. Even then organizations are shifting their strategic focus on ERP to gain ...various tangible benefits. The key objective of this research study is to develop a strategy based on empirical evidences to overcome the issues of ERP implementations failure for developing countries like Pakistan. The mixed method of research with sequential strategy has been used to explore and explain the realities behind success and failure of ERP implementation. In the first phase of the research, qualitative data has been gathered through extensive literature review and interviews. NVivo 10 software has been used to explore the critical success factors of ERP implementation. In the 2nd phase of the research, surveys have conducted. SPSS 20 tool has been used for applying exploratory factor analysis and then Partial Least Square based Structural Equation Modelling (PLS-SEM) with Smart PLS 3 has been used to know the existence and strength of relationship between dependent and independent variables identified in the study. It has been found that Commitment by the Top Management, Project-Management, Change Management, Business Process Re-Engineering have strong relationship with the successful implementation of ERP, whereas Training-education and Vendor management have been found to be less significant for the ERP implementation success. This study has provided a great contribution for the recipient client organizations, ERP implementers, ERP vendors and Consultants intending to join the implementation cluster. The
implementation strategy was validated through a case study in public sector organization which gave encouraging results.
The emergence of blockchain technology has created a number of potential innovations in handling business activities across various industries. However, few studies discuss the potential influence of ...blockchain technology from a business process re-engineering perspective. This study focuses on the feasibility and inceptive application of supply chain processes. We proposed a blockchain-based framework along with the use of an affiliated technology, i.e., smart contracts, to derive the feasible benefits of the supply chain process design. Through the illustrative design of an integrated process, we provide an achievable use case of the disintermediation of business processes via a conceptual, shared information ledger. This ledger not only facilitates the sharing of tracking information but also promotes a network for multilateral collaboration among supply chain members. The pursuit of transparency and accountability across supply chain processes can potentially influence decentralization and automation. A comparative analysis of the current and proposed frameworks is conducted to support the core reasoning of this study. Additionally, future implications on managerial practice and academic research are explored to provide pervasive suggestions for similar attempts in different sectors. We conclude with an evaluation of the potential influence of blockchain technology on supply chain management.
•Blockchain and smart contract technology can help conduct business process re-engineering (BPR) across enterprise borders.•A blockchain-based BPR framework is proposed and explored to automate business flows in tracking supply chain processes.•Blockchain-based business apps can be designed and implemented using the proposed framework to harvest blockchain benefits.•Blockchain and smart contract based business applications may significantly affect our digital life in the near future.
Business process management has been widely adopted by many organizations, resulting in the accumulation of large collections of process models. The majority of these models are rather large and ...complex. Even though such models constitute a great source of knowledge, they cannot be easily understood by all process stakeholders. Process model abstraction techniques have been proven effective in generating easy to comprehend, high-level views on business process models; thus, such techniques change the way that detailed process models may be utilized within an organization. Although much attention has been given to abstract activities of process models, to the best of our knowledge, there are no research works that deliver abstract process model views, by considering as candidates for abstraction not only activities but also other process model elements. In this paper, we present an abstraction approach that simplifies existing process models by focusing not only on the abstraction of activities, but also on the abstraction of data, roles, messages and artifacts. The proposed approach exploits both model structure and element properties, while it is grounded on a set of abstraction rules. A prototype tool has been implemented as a proof of concept; this tool has been used for validating the proposed approach by automatically applying the suggested abstraction rules to different sets of real-world process models. A number of process stakeholders have also been involved in this validation. Thus, it is empirically proved that the presented work is an effective process model abstraction method that increases the usability of complex business process models, as it enables their rapid comprehension by process stakeholders.
•Large and complex business process models cannot be easily comprehended and utilized.•Professionals at managerial levels need simplified models for decision making purposes.•Business process abstraction facilitates quick comprehension of large process models.•Business process abstraction enhances process model their usability within an organization.•A holistic approach that exploits both process model structure and element properties.•The approach fosters abstraction and rapid comprehension of complex business processes.
Enriching business processes with the semantic knowledge of an ontology is recognized as a fundamental need in business process management in order to obtain better models and perform more expressive ...execution analyses. In our work, we model semantically annotated business processes in an OWL knowledge base formalizing the structure of business processes together with the associated business domain. We extend previous work in three substantial manners: first, we show how to exploit the OWL knowledge base to represent the complex data artifacts manipulated by a business process (together with the process itself); second, we show how execution traces can be added into the OWL knowledge base to perform a process execution analysis involving knowledge about both the structure and the domain of a business process; third, we show how to support the semantic modeling and analysis of complex data-aware business processes and their executions. In detail, we illustrate how we extended the MoKi tool for enabling the collaborative modeling of semantically annotated complex data-aware processes, and for supporting their execution analysis via semantic-based reasoning techniques capable of scaling to non-trivial amounts of data while maintaining their advantages. The feasibility and usefulness of the proposed conceptual framework and tool support is shown through a real use case and an experimental evaluation.
•Use of ontology-based architecture to provide a specification of complex artifacts.•Integration of execution traces into an ontology-based architecture.•Use of process structure and domain knowledge to perform process execution analysis.
•We have ciritcally evaluated cloud service providers business processes on cloud data security.•We have also evaluated cloud computing adoption framework (CCAF).•We have developed cloud data ...security models based on Business Process Modelling Notations (BPMN).•We have conducted BPMN simulation for CSP-1 & CSP-3 and the results can reveal performances issues related to data security as part of any organizations initiative on Business Process Management (BPM).
Today’s data is sensitive that requires privacy and security both from the cloud service providers (CSP) as well as from users in its all the form of data states: data at rest, while transferring data, enquiring data, and processing the data. Cloud computing has been applied in the health sector, national security services, banking and other business and companies that store confidential data into the cloud as we have seen in recent years. Therefore, information and data security is a crucial issue that needs to be addressed thoroughly in the cloud computing business. This research deals with the performance analysis of recent cloud data security models. This paper proposes cloud data security models based on Business Process Modeling Notations (BPMN) and simulation results can reveal performances issues related to data security as part of any organizations initiative on Business process management (BPM).
Summary
Blockchain platforms, such as Ethereum, allow a set of actors to maintain a ledger of transactions without relying on a central authority and to deploy programs, called smart contracts, that ...are executed whenever certain transactions occur. These features can be used as basic building blocks for executing collaborative business processes between mutually untrusting parties. However, implementing business processes using the low‐level primitives provided by blockchain platforms is cumbersome and error‐prone. In contrast, established business process management systems (BPMSs), such as those based on the standard Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN), provide convenient ions for rapid development of process‐oriented applications. This article demonstrates how to combine the advantages of a BPMS with those of a blockchain platform. The article introduces a blockchain‐based BPMN execution engine, named Caterpillar. Like any BPMN execution engine, Caterpillar supports the creation of instances of a process model and allows users to monitor the state of process instances and to execute tasks thereof. The specificity of Caterpillar is that the state of each process instance is maintained on the (Ethereum) blockchain and the workflow routing is performed by smart contracts generated by a BPMN‐to‐Solidity compiler. The Caterpillar compiler supports a large array of BPMN constructs, including subprocesses, multiple‐instance activities, and event handlers. The paper describes the architecture of Caterpillar and the interfaces it provides to support the monitoring of process instances, the allocation and execution of work items, and the execution of service tasks.
This study empirically investigated the effect of business process reengineering factors on organisational performance in the Saudi context. A quantitative approach was employed whereby this study ...focused on Riyadh factory for re-refining oils employees. A total of 110 useable questionnaires were used in the statistical analysis. Business process reengineering factors that were investigated include the major improvements after business process reengineering, the major changes after implementation of business process reengineering and the personal gain after business reengineering process. The results showed that the only two factors out of the three do affect organisational performance in Riyadh factory for re-refining oils employees namely the major improvements after business process reengineering and the major changes after implementation of business process reengineering.
The execution of a business process usually involves the cooperation of many resources (actors) performing various tasks (activities). Generally speaking, the cooperation among actors could ...significantly influence the efficiency of process execution. The better cooperation among actors, the higher performance the process instance would achieve. The task allocation is, therefore, expected to ensure that the actors are compatible well with each other when performing tasks. However, the decision of task allocation is always ad-hoc or performed manually in many organizations. As for some automatic methods, they usually serve only for sequentially structured simple processes. In addition, the existing studies only concentrate on the cooperation between two actors and fail to consider the effects from the context of performing different tasks by these two actors especially in the business process with many-to-many relationships among the resources and activities. To address these issues, we handle the process with complex block structures including iteration, choice and parallelism, and propose an effective entity-wise method to measure the cooperation by combining both actors and activities together. Based on them, we present two approaches, one greedy-based and the other A*-based, to assign actors for maximum cooperation in the complex structured business process with many-to-many relationships among the resources and activities. The experimental results on both public released and synthetic datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approaches.
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