Business Process Network Research Articles

A business process network efficiency model for handling conflicting information

In today's big data era, where a significant volume of business data is generated daily, managing conflicting information within business process networks is crucial for maintaining operational efficiency. This paper addresses this challenge by proposing an efficiency model for business process networks tailored to handle conflict information, drawing on queuing theory and evidence theory. Firstly, we introduce a novel approach for measuring conflict information based on evidence theory and Pignistic probability transformation theory. Next, we tailor efficiency models for the four fundamental structures found in business process networks: sequential, selective, parallel, and loop structures, using queuing theory to manage conflict information effectively in each scenario. We further extend this approach by conceptualizing virtual business activities, allowing us to view the entire business process network as a sequential structure of virtual business activities, facilitating efficiency measurement across the network. Utilizing these measurements, we formulate the queuing service of the business process network as a nonlinear programming problem aimed at minimizing time, thus determining the optimal service rate for business process activities. Finally, we demonstrate the applicability and effectiveness of our proposed model through an experimental analysis focused on the railway intermodal transportation business process. The experimental results indicate that our model significantly reduces the impact of conflicting information, leading to a measurable improvement in the efficiency of the business process network. Specifically, the model achieves a notable enhancement in the coordination and execution of intermodal transportation activities, thereby streamlining operations and reducing decision-making uncertainties. This structured approach not only addresses the challenge of managing conflicting information within business process networks but also provides a clear framework for understanding and optimizing network efficiency.

SMART HALAL SUPPLY CHAIN PERFORMANCE: INDONESIA FISHERY PORTS SUSTAINABLE

Performance plays a crucial role in a company's survival, as it determines its success rate. We conducted this research to design performance measurements for a retail business in Fish Landing Ports, utilizing the Halal Supply Chain Operation Reference. This approach aims to gauge the current value of the company's performance and offer recommendations for potential improvements. Until now, the company has not conducted performance measurement across all its business process networks, focusing solely on product sales and profit value. Therefore, the company conducted research using the SCOR (Supply Chain Operation Reference) method based on Islamic values, with the expectation of measuring supply chain performance more objectively and in detail to create competitive advantages. We use the AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) method to assign weights to each criterion in the SCOR design. The supply chain performance measurement design yields its results. We obtain 22 metrics, five of which are based on Islamic values and categorised into five main business processes: plan, source, make, deliver, and return, drawing on literature and expert opinions for guidance. We carry out the assessment using a normalisation process to equalise the scale of values on each metric. The performance measurement results are very satisfactory, with a value of 91.713144. However, four metrics still have low values, indicating the need for improvement proposals. Furthermore, the plan has the highest weight of 0.42, followed by deliver, source, and return, all of which have weights of 0.22, 0.22, and 0.14 respectively.

Cloud Computing Leads Towards Sustainable Supply Chain Management

In today's environment, businesses are looking into cutting-edge strategies to improve their supply chain's cost and operational effectiveness. Cloud computing appears to be a promising technology that can help with this optimization by providing infrastructure, platform, and software solutions for the entire supply chain network over the Internet. The use of cloud-based services in supply chain management has financial and operational benefits, but all supply chain stakeholders should be aware of potential dangers and restrictions. Cloud computing can improve supply chain collaboration and infrastructure needs by allowing for more flexible outsourcing of software. Rather of sustaining and paying for maximum use, this technology proposes an approach that allows for flexibility in adding on the way, depending on the entire business process and supply chain network model. Aside from the normal tech hype, cloud computing has the potential to be an ideal technology for supporting and managing a constantly changing and dynamic network, and thus for supply chain management (SCM). This paper provides an overview of cloud-based supply chain management. A quick introduction to cloud technologies is given first. The factors of cloud computing which effect supply chain activities is then examined, as well as the benefits and drawbacks of incorporating this technology into current supply chains. Finally, findings are offered, as well as future study directions.

A novel complex manufacturing business process decomposition approach in cloud manufacturing

In cloud manufacturing, manufacturing business processes are virtualized and encapsulated into manufacturing services. Enterprises can customize their manufacturing business applications on cloud manufacturing platform. To facilitate the customization, a global manufacturing business process is generally built and transformed into a feature model. However, since most global manufacturing business processes have a large number of nodes and complex dependency relationships, it is difficult to transform them into feature models. Therefore, we propose a novel complex manufacturing business process decomposition approach in cloud manufacturing. The approach is beneficial to construct a desired feature model. Firstly, combined with the domain engineering theory, the complex manufacturing business process customization approach in cloud manufacturing is elaborated. Secondly, the complex manufacturing business process decomposition approach is proposed. A global manufacturing business process network (GMBPN) is constructed according to the input and output relationships of manufacturing business activities. Based on the GMBPN, a two-phase decomposition algorithm is presented. In the community detection phase, the nodes in the GMBPN with functional similarity are clustered into the same community with an adaptive strategy. In the sub-process reconstruction phase, the corresponding sub-process is reconstructed in each community. We evaluate the decomposition algorithm with an actual elevator design business process. Experimental results show the proposed algorithm is effective to find the optimal decomposition results.

Quantifying Risk Propagation Within a Network of Business Processes and IT Services

Nowadays, the organic nature of business processes and the increasingly complex and dynamic business environment make organizations face severe operational risks. However, current risk analysis methods of Information Technology (IT) resources ignore inter-process correlation and thus inter-process risk propagation. This gap needs a solution since the rigid alignment of organizations cause the risks which propagate throughout the whole organization to be the most serious operational risks. This paper presents a holistic approach for quantifying risk propagation in business processes based on the risk analysis of their underlying IT and human resources. This approach adapts financial techniques to quantify the level of risk that average and severe events on IT resources generate on individual business processes, and to quantify the risk propagation impact among dependent processes. This approach was applied to an enterprise modeling case study to quantify risk propagation for different risk epicenter scenarios. The results show that the proposed approach is capable of finding and quantifying both direct and indirect dependencies among operational assets within an organization. A high level of accuracy was observed when comparing the actual value of the process risk and the projected value considering risk propagation.

An Experimental Study for Intelligent Logistics: A Middleware Approach

Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth in using Internet of things (IoT), which facilitates and simultaneously raises challenges for the intelligent logistics. The real-world devices can provide their functionality as Web services. Because of the dynamicity and heterogeneity of the target networking environment, the services offered by IoT resources cannot be composed by simply extending existing Service oriented architecture (SOA) approaches. Logistics, which consists of a complex network of organizations and business processes, must be monitored in real time. Based on the proper understanding of the possible exceptions, we propose a middleware approach to solve the logistics service composition in IoT, where a decentralized coordination mechanism is used to monitor the component services with few resources efficiently. Through a set of experiments, the effectiveness and robustness of our approach are evaluated.

Organisational resilience in a cloud-based enterprise in a supply chain: a challenge for innovative SMEs

The main idea of the paper is to analyse the organisational resilience potential of enterprises that may be modelled as a non-cloud enterprise or modelled from the perspective of being a cloud-based enterprise in a supply chain. In this manner, the model of an organisation is presented as a network of business processes. Organisational resilience factors (RFs) are assessed on the level of each business process and the overall level of organisational resilience potential is obtained for each organisation. The level of organisational resilience potential in these organisations is assessed when the enterprise is modelled, in the first place, as a non-cloud enterprise and also modelled from the perspective of being a cloud-based enterprise in a supply chain. In this way, the level of organisational resilience potential may be compared and analysed, which is a significant benchmark starting point for this research and practice domain.

Network management of business processes at the industrial enterprises

The use of the classification of business processes at industrial enterprise in stages of the life cycle is discussed and some research results in this area are given in this article. The main purpose of research is developing a network of business processes on the machinery enterprise and analysis of dedicated macro-processes and business processes with a view to further streamline and improve the efficiency of their management. The methodological approaches to the classification of business processes on different grounds, and the need to study the business processes in time and space, using the life-cycle process, are discussed in this article. The presented methodical approach to network construction of business processes enables to analyze the resulting network by expert diagnosis on the basis of empirical data. Using the business process management diagram, depending on the stage at which it is located, we allow to optimize the constructed network by its restructuring, and to improve the internal business processes according to the aims of enterprise. The presented methodical approach is recommended to use at the enterprises when the main strategic directions of its development is innovation. The research results can be used by managers of industrial enterprises involved in strategic planning, as well as increasing the enterprise efficiency.

Constructing A Business Process Network System A-BPNS-NPD

The authors came up with Amasaka laboratorys Business Process Network System for New Product Developments - A-BPNS-NPD - a business process network system that supports improvements in the way businesses approach new product development. Specifically, it is a core system with four components, each of which is designed to clarify the unspoken business processes that companies use in new product development. The first component is a support system for visualizing business processes. The second is a support system for better planning. The third is a support system for work progress management, which includes a support system for passing on know-how and for expansion and growth. The fourth component is a new product development business process approach model to help companies systematically put the other components into action. The A-BPNS-NPD developed by the authors was verified at manufacturing companies and the desired results were obtained.

개인정보보호의 신경향 －프라이버시 중심 디자인(Privacy by Design)을 중심으로－

In order to correctly keep privacy, increasing self cognition on privacy by individual is necessary first of all. Service provider needs to perform ``Privacy by Design`` which is an privacy focused design examining possibility of privacy invasion and minimizing risk in own corporation service. In order to certainly protect privacy, relying on only regulation obedience is not sufficient. Hence, government or corporation needs to promote construction of a structure for technically protecting privacy in design stage. It is required to certainly protect privacy from initial stage. That is, it is to ``construct from first stage`` the system for personal information protection. The base of ``Privacy by Design`` can be said to be in the technology, but application of its concept also gradually affects design of responsible business process and physical space or network, infrastructure. This is not simply subject to only technology (especially, information system) but general business process. Among them, Dr. Ann Cavoukian mentioned the specific object as IT system (technical field) field, responsible business convention, physical design and network infra. Privacy by Design concept has been actively discussed recent years. Especially, in 32th International Personal Information Protection Authority Conference1) opened on October, 2010, Privacy by Design was agreed to be recognized as essential element. What the International Personal Information Protection Authority Conference agreed on was that Privacy by Design is recognized as new global privacy standard. Actually, the agreement in this conference encourages acceptance a basic principle of Privacy by Design. Due to promotion and support for review structure about international privacy, application of Privacy by Design is proceeded worldwide. What the Privacy by Design try to keep is privacy information of user (citizen, consumer, customer) in a word and privacy of user itself who is a principal agent of that information. This is clear that the source of Privacy by Design is PETs(Privacy Enhancing Technologies) and the basic requirement is appeared while PETs concept is evolved. PETs is the whole technology enhancing personal privacy protection in information system. This was originally to prevent illegal collection, use and provision of personal data and enhance control on own personal information by individual. Specifically, a technology remove cookie or virus, filtering spam mail, etc. However, recently service provider lays a stress on ``consideration at design stage``, ``advancement of technology receiving feedback from user`` and requests tool or system environment more actively protecting privacy. A thought on the positive sum which ``protects both user and provider`` has been widely applied. As service provider cooperates in protecting privacy information in advance with user not leaving it to user, he can obtain trust from user and the business relations can be enhanced. Such a new paradigm became the basis for Privacy by Design. On this new paradigm which each world nation is actively discussing and applying, our country should more positively discuss and cope actively with application environment (changes in technology and legal system) of Privacy by Design worldwide.

Advanced Data Processing in the Business Network System

The discovery, representation and reconstruction of Business Networks (BN) from Network Mining (NM) raw data is a difficult problem for enterprises. This is due to huge amounts of e.g. complex business processes within and across enterprise boundaries, heterogeneous technology stacks, and fragmented data. To remain competitive, visibility into the enterprise and partner networks on different, interrelated abstraction levels is desirable. We show the query and data processing capabilities of a novel data discovery, mining and network inference system, called Business Network System (BNS) that reconstructs the BN - integration and business process networks - from raw data, hidden in the enterprises' landscapes. The paper covers both the foundation and the key data processing characteristics features of BNS, including its underlying technologies, its overall system architecture, and data provenance approach.

Issues of Modeling Web Information Systems Proposal for a Document-centric Approach

There have been already several researches on modeling various aspects of WIS. In our approach, we concentrate on the organizational and process modeling and we put the emphasis on documents that represent the information of enterprises in the form of unstructured and semi-structured documents. The assembly of documents reflects implicitly or explicitly the organization of enterprise and the network of business processes and the activities and tasks within processes. The documents represent at the same time the organizational roles along with tasks and activities. Our modeling approach concentrates on the co-existence and co-operation of documents and activities of business. The Story Algebra, or more generally the process algebra approach provides a formal framework that promises a formal describing method for modeling precisely the event triggered processes coupled with data in document format within an Enterprise Architecture Framework.

Detail REA production planning model using value chain

Abstract REA (resource-event-agent) is an ontology based on the value oriented perspective of resources, utilized in business process modeling. The value chain model is a network of business processes that are bound by the inflows and outflows of resources, the result of which provides an overview of the business processes of a particular enterprise and validates the consistency of the whole model. The fact that resources can only flow among business processes considerably restricts activities such as planning, controlling and monitoring. The paper designs advancement how to adopt the REA value chain model in order to effectively comprise the flows of entities between two neighboring REA process models at both operational and policy levels.

Applying Social Network Analysis to Discover Service Innovation within Agile Service Networks

The literature indicates that there is urgent need to address the significant gap in our ability to value the contributory interaction of service networks in organisational performance. This paper is primarily concerned with exploring how service (re)configuration is utilised to optimise network performance. The paper will summarise the literature review over the past year in the quest to document how we can understand the contributory value of service innovation networks. It identifies some interesting overlaps in business process management, service science, and network innovation literature. This paper will discuss how failing to account for the value of service networks inhibits our capability to discover and monitor service performance and how this complements the evolvement of service science. This prevents managers from transforming information on network activity and infrastructural capabilities into strategic knowledge. This paper demonstrates how social network analysis (SNA) can be a powerful tool for managers to understand organisational network performance and service interaction. [Service Science, ISSN 2164-3962 (print), ISSN 2164-3970 (online), was published by Services Science Global (SSG) from 2009 to 2011 as issues under ISBN 978-1-4276-2090-3.]

Ontology Development for Designing and Managing Dynamic Business Process Networks

Recent advances in flexible process design and deployment technologies, such as web services and flexible workflow systems, promise the development of flexible intra- and inter-organizational business process networks with potential economic benefits. However, exploiting this potential requires the development of scalable process-management technologies that provide a consistent viewpoint and common language (for describing properties of the process network) to all stakeholders involved in its management. Current approaches to managing such networks requires one to use a babel of languages (in the formal sense) at different levels of abstraction. The development of explicit process ontologies is one of the potentially viable approaches to provide an unified view. In this paper, we discuss the need for process ontologies, propose a task-based ontological framework synthesizing recent research in the fields of AI planning and software engineering, and illustrate the need to link declarative and procedural process representations. We illustrate the use of this ontological framework for managing processes in developing applications for integrating information from disparate information sources in multiple domains. Further, based on this experience, we discuss potential benefits and areas for future research.

Enriched multi-process modelling in support of the life cycle engineering of Business Processes

A new approach to enterprise modelling is described that facilitates the reuse of multi-perspective models of Business Process networks. The approach has been designed to advance current best practice when engineering change to interdependent Business Processes of types commonly deployed within Manufacturing Enterprises. The approach is unique in the way it maintains coherence between (1) conventional enterprise models, used primarily to represent graphically (at multiple levels of abstraction) relatively enduring properties of Business Process networks; and (2) dynamic models of selected segments of a parent Business Process network, which can be computer-executed via conventional simulation modelling and workflow modelling technology. Thereby, context-dependent dynamic models can be used to replicate and analyse historical patterns of enterprise behaviour, and predict and analyse possible future patterns of enterprise behaviour, should selected elements and parameters of the modelled Business Process network be changed. The paper also considers ‘needed decision support capabilities’ during Business Process Reengineering and Business Process improvement projects. In so doing, it collates those decision support requirements identified into a generalized description of the life phases of such projects. This generalized description was used to help structure the design of the new enterprise modelling approach. Furthermore, it is used to help illustrate an example application of the new modelling approach.

Architectural design support for business process and business network engineering

Concurrent enterprises and networks of business processes cannot function without each other. Cooperation in networks allows for faster reaction to business opportunities. Cooperation requires that the business processes and information technology (IT) systems within and between companies are well aligned with the demands their environment puts upon them. This requires a careful and effective analysis and design of business processes from a customer-to-customer perspective. Moreover, the introduction of IT for effective business network operations and coordination will only function in a predictable way when one has an accurate (design) model of the interaction and cooperation in the network. Therefore, a good model is essential. In this paper, we show how the modelling and analysis principles we developed for business process engineering can be used in business network engineering. We also introduce a visual design studio developed for this purpose. This visual design studio enables business process engineers to capture and analyse both structural and behavioural aspects of (networks of) business processes in terms of models without having actually to build these processes first. Models created with this visual design studio can be analysed and reconfigured on the basis of various business scenarios and perspectives and/or new technological possibilities. In the same way, the strategic benefit of IT for business processes and networks can be analysed and demonstrated. We furthermore discuss the additional endeavours confronted within business network engineering projects in contrast to business process engineering.