From Measuring the Quality of Labels in Process Models to a Discourse on Process Model Quality: A Case Study

Author(s):  
Peter Fettke ◽  
Armella-Lucia Vella ◽  
Peter Loos
2014 ◽  
Vol 2014 ◽  
pp. 1-8
Author(s):  
Weidong Zhao ◽  
Xi Liu ◽  
Weihui Dai

Process mining is automated acquisition of process models from event logs. Although many process mining techniques have been developed, most of them are based on control flow. Meanwhile, the existing role-oriented process mining methods focus on correctness and integrity of roles while ignoring role complexity of the process model, which directly impacts understandability and quality of the model. To address these problems, we propose a genetic programming approach to mine the simplified process model. Using a new metric of process complexity in terms of roles as the fitness function, we can find simpler process models. The new role complexity metric of process models is designed from role cohesion and coupling, and applied to discover roles in process models. Moreover, the higher fitness derived from role complexity metric also provides a guideline for redesigning process models. Finally, we conduct case study and experiments to show that the proposed method is more effective for streamlining the process by comparing with related studies.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 38-56 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raphael De Almeida Rodrigues ◽  
Leonardo Guerreiro Azevedo ◽  
Kate Cerqueira Revoredo

The proper representation of a Business process is important for its execution and understanding. BPMN has been used as the standard notation for business process models, however domain specialists, which are experts in the business, do not have necessarily the modeling skills to easily read a business process model. It is easier for them to read in natural language. In this work, we propose a language-independent framework, instantiated using Java standard technology, for generating automatically natural language texts from business process models. A case study was conducted to evaluate the quality of the generated text. We found empirical support that the textual work instructions can be considered equivalent, in terms of knowledge representation, to process models represented in BPMN. Regarding the framework output quality (textual descriptions) 86% of the subjects claims that it vary from excellent to good.


2020 ◽  
pp. 464-478
Author(s):  
Loubna El Faquih ◽  
Mounia Fredj

In recent years, business process modeling has increasingly drawn the attention of enterprises. As a result of the wide use of business processes, redundancy problems have arisen and researchers introduced the variability management, in order to enhance the business process reuse. The most approach used in this context is the Configurable Process Model solution, which consists in representing the variable and the fixed parts together in a unique model. Due to the increasing number of variants, the configurable models become complex and incomprehensible, and their quality is therefore impacted. Most of research work is limited to the syntactic quality of process variants. The approach presented in this paper aims at providing a novel method towards syntactic verification and semantic validation of configurable process models based on ontology languages. We define validation rules for assessing the quality of configurable process models. An example in the e-healthcare domain illustrates the main steps of our approach.


2020 ◽  
pp. 370-394
Author(s):  
Say Yen Teoh ◽  
Shun Cai

Despite many attempts to introduce computerization in the healthcare industry, the majority of the current healthcare information systems still fail to meet the rising expectations of patients for service. This study aims to understand how agility and innovation capabilities can be strategically nurtured, developed, and managed to upgrade the quality of healthcare services. Based on a case study, a process model is developed to explain that an agile innovation strategy is a complex helix process involving a firm's sensitivity and responsiveness to integrating and reconfiguring its resources to cope with innovative change. Three key managerial contributions for IT and medical practitioners are presented.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
pp. 566-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julio Cesar Sampaio do Prado Leite ◽  
Flavia Maria Santoro ◽  
Claudia Cappelli ◽  
Thais Vasconcelos Batista ◽  
Fabiana Jack Nogueira Santos

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to propose a representation scheme based on the i* strategic actor model to represent the process owner information and show how to incorporate this approach into the event driven process chain and Business Process Modeling Notation-BPMN meta-models and also into the aspect-oriented business process modeling (BPM) context. Design/methodology/approach – The authors use a case study in a real setting to evaluate the proposal and a controlled experiment to get more evidence about its relevance. Findings – The authors presented evidence both from a case study in a real-world library showing the importance of representing – previously unavailable – process owner information, and from an experiment which involved participants analyzing the same models of the case study, confirming the preliminary evidences. It is important to stress the recognition that the proposed representation provided more transparency, in terms of ownership, than the usual BPM models. These benefits are due to the combination of the aspect-oriented approach and the strategic actor model, providing ownership information in a more transparent way. Originality/value – The authors not only argue the importance of clearly established process ownership, both of the core process and the aspectual process, but also the authors presented an approach to represent the actor involved in process and aspect ownership as an instantiation of the i* strategic actor. Using this approach, the process owner can be defined in terms of actors instead of the activities performed. It is also possible to define the aspect owner and to include the aspectual process concept in the business process model.


Author(s):  
Nicole Zero ◽  
Joshua D. Summers

Abstract Current research and literature lack the discussion of how production automation is introduced to existing lines from the perspective of change management. This paper presents a case study conducted to understand the change management process for a large-scale automation implementation in a manufacturing environment producing highly complex products. Through a series of fifteen semi-structured interviews of eight engineers from three functional backgrounds, a process model was created to understand how the company of study introduced a new automation system into their existing production line, while also noting obstacles identified in the process. This process model illustrates the duration, sequencing, teaming, and complexity of the project. This model is compared to other change process models found in literature to understand critical elements found within change management. The process that was revealed in the case study appeared to contain some elements of a design process as compared to traditional change management processes found in literature. Finally, a collaborative resistance model is applied to the process model to identify and estimate the resistance for each task in the process. Based on the objective analysis of the collaborative situations, the areas of highest resistance are identified. By comparing the resistance model to the interview data, the results show that the resistance model does identify the challenges found in interviews. This means that the resistance model has the potential to identify obstacles within the process and open the opportunity to mitigate those challenges before they are encountered within the process.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (6) ◽  
pp. 1357-1376 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fadwa Yahya ◽  
Khouloud Boukadi ◽  
Hanêne Ben-Abdallah

Purpose The quality of a Business Process (BP) model is vital for the successful accomplishment of all its lifecycle phases. Indeed, a high-quality BP model makes its implementation, execution and evaluation easier. In the literature, the improvement of BP model quality has been dealt with using several techniques. For instance, modeling guidelines, refactoring techniques, and transformation rules are the most used ones. The purpose of this paper is to exploit existing initiatives in this field to help designers improve their BP models. Design/methodology/approach This paper draws up a systematic inventory of the existing approaches to improve the quality of BP models. Moreover, it provides a comparative evaluation with the aim of identifying the particularities of each approach as well as the common gaps in the state of the art. Finally, it proposes a guiding framework, called BP-Quality, that supports designers in improving the quality of their BP models. Findings The usability of BP-Quality is illustrated through a case study and a set of experiments. The preliminary experimental evaluation of this guiding framework shows encouraging results. Originality/value The proposed guiding framework has the merit of exploiting existing initiatives in the field of BP quality improvement. In addition, it customizes and optimizes the quality improvement process according to the particularities of each BP model.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 429-456 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Hastie ◽  
Monty Sutrisna ◽  
Charles Egbu

Purpose This paper aims to disseminate the knowledge integration process modelling throughout the phases of the early contractor involvement (ECI) procurement methodology, to optimise the benefit of ECI procurement method. The development of the model was aimed at taking advantage from the associated benefits of integrating knowledge and of ECI procurement. ECI provides contractors with an alternative means to tendering, designing and constructing projects. Thus, this paper explores knowledge interconnectivity and its integration involving numerous disciplines with various stakeholders to benefit from the collaborative environment of ECI. Design/methodology/approach The methodology implemented in the research includes a thorough literature review to establish the characteristics of the ECI tender stage as well as the characteristics of knowledge to be integrated in an ECI setting. Following this, an embedded case study research methodology was used involving three healthcare ECI projects undertaken by a Western Australian commercial contractor through 20 semi-structured interviews and project archival study, followed by the development of knowledge integration process models throughout the ECI process of the studied cases. Findings The research findings provide the basis to develop a knowledge integration process model throughout the ECI stages. The tender stage was found to be the most crucial stage for knowledge integration, particularly from the main contractor’s perspective to impart change and to influence the project outcome. The outcome of this research identifies the richness and interconnectivity of knowledge throughout the knowledge integration process in an ECI project starting from the intra-organisational knowledge integration process followed by the inter-organisational process of knowledge integration. This inside-out perspective of knowledge integration also revealed the need for mapping the implementation of knowledge integration from instrumental to incremental approach throughout the ECI stages in optimising the intended benefits of integrating knowledge. Originality/value This paper reports the development of a knowledge integration process model with the view to optimise the management effectiveness of integrating knowledge in ECI projects. Although knowledge integration and ECI can be considered existing and widely accepted concepts, the novelty of this research lies in the specific use of the knowledge integration process to analyse the knowledge flow, transformation and, hence, management in ECI projects. As it has been acknowledged that knowledge integration is beneficial but also a complex process, the methodology implemented here in modelling the process can be used as the basis to model knowledge integration in other ECI projects to further capitalise from ECI as a collaborative procurement method.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 168-190
Author(s):  
Fouzia Kahloun ◽  
Sonia Ayachi-Ghannouchi

Purpose The concept of business process (BP) management plays a major role in information systems with several applications. Modeling languages and tools can be used by domain experts to help in the business process model (BPM) design. The purpose of this paper is to focus on quality improvement for BPMs through the proposition of a novel prototype and apply it on real case for BPMs in the field of higher education. Design/methodology/approach The authors developed a prototype named Business Process Model Quality Assess (BPMoQualAssess) that works in two steps. In the first step, it allows designing and verifying the quality of BPMs in the field of higher education. Second, it focuses on evaluating process results through a set of criteria and specific measures for each process. Both steps are based on three main key concepts: measures, threshold values and guidelines in order to guide the modeler in assessing his/her model and also to get good results from the latter. Findings The authors implemented the BPMoQualAssess prototype to evaluate the quality of BPMs as well as its results. Furthermore, the authors have conducted a case study with a process in the field of higher education. Indeed, first, the authors obtained an improved BPM with a high-quality level. Second, the authors then evaluated the results by focusing on measures, threshold values and appropriate quality guidelines in order to obtain better results. Originality/value In the context of this study, the authors aim to make a significant contribution to the knowledge on the subject of the quality for higher education sector processes, on one hand on the models and on the other hand the results of processes. All these concepts are fully nested within a new quality prototype for process model evaluation and validated on real BPMs in the field of higher education. There are many publications focusing on BP quality in the literature, but only a few approaches combine the main keys thresholds, measures and guidelines. In fact, the principal contribution of this research consists in linking measures and threshold values to the resulting guidelines as they have been presented separately in the literature. Furthermore, the authors elaborate for each measure its own recommendation to guide the modeler in redesigning his/her model. Also, the authors define threshold values of process results in higher education and also took into account the opinion of domain experts. To sum up, the originality of this work appears in the application of BPM in the field of higher education given the lack of work in the literature for this direction, and it will pave a way for research in BP innovation areas.


Author(s):  
Yun Lin ◽  
Darijus Strasunskas

Process models represent valuable resources for integration and alignment of business processes. Nowadays, due to networked business and tighter integration along a value chain, the number of enterprises that need to orchestrate their workflows is increasing. These circumstances urge companies to improve management of process models and templates. Machine-readable and interoperable semantics of the process templates facilitate retrieval and reuse. However, the heterogeneity of both model representations and modeling languages makes it difficult to retrieve, comprehend, compare, and reuse the templates. Therefore, in this chapter we elaborate on the semantic annotation of process model templates consisting of three basic parts: meta-model, domain, and goal annotations. For this purpose, we use ontologies representing generic constructs of process models, concepts from a business domain, and business goals. We illustrate application of the approach in OWL and provide a case study with exemplary semantic queries.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document