Cross-organizational Processes Research Articles

Laying the ground for future cross-organizational process mining research and application: a literature review

Purpose Process mining (PM) has emerged as a leading technology for gaining data-based insights into organizations’ business processes. As processes increasingly cross-organizational boundaries, firms need to conduct PM jointly with multiple organizations to optimize their operations. However, current knowledge on cross-organizational process mining (coPM) is widely dispersed. Therefore, we synthesize current knowledge on coPM, identify challenges and enablers of coPM, and build a socio-technical framework and agenda for future research.Design/methodology/approach We conducted a literature review of 66 articles and summarized the findings according to the framework for Information Technology (IT)-enabled inter-organizational coordination (IOC) and the refined PM framework. The former states that within inter-organizational relationships, uncertainty sources determine information processing needs and coordination mechanisms determine information processing capabilities, while the fit between needs and capabilities determines the relationships’ performance. The latter distinguishes three categories of PM activities: cartography, auditing and navigation.Findings Past literature focused on coPM techniques, for example, algorithms for ensuring privacy and PM for cartography. Future research should focus on socio-technical aspects and follow four steps: First, determine uncertainty sources within coPM. Second, design, develop and evaluate coordination mechanisms. Third, investigate how the mechanisms assist with handling uncertainty. Fourth, analyze the impact on coPM performance. In addition, we present 18 challenges (e.g. integrating distributed data) and 9 enablers (e.g. aligning different strategies) for coPM application.Originality/valueThis is the first article to systematically investigate the status quo of coPM research and lay out a socio-technical research agenda building upon the well-established framework for IT-enabled IOC.

Step-by-Step Case ID Identification Based on Activity Connection for Cross-Organizational Process Mining

Cross-organizational process mining aims to discover an entire process model across multiple organizations where their identifier (ID) systems are not managed uniformly, and each organization has an independent ID system. Cross-organizational process mining has been gaining popularity as information systems increase in complexity. However, previous methods have limitations in that they do not work well for event logs that contain only common items, or cyclic orchestrations, which indicates that the model contains loops. In this paper, we propose an accurate cross-organizational process mining technique based on a step-by-step case ID identification mechanism that uses only common items in event logs and can handle cyclic orchestrations. Step-by-step case ID identification repeats the following steps: 1) identification of case IDs based on activity connection of adjacent event pairs, and 2) extraction of additional activity connections by leveraging the newly identified case IDs. We alternately identify the most probable case ID pairs and remove events belonging to these identified case IDs from the event log, which contributes to extracting additional activity connections and narrowing down the candidates of case ID pairs. Evaluation using real-world event logs showed that the proposed method generates the process model with more than 98.4% precision and more than 94.2% recall for two datasets, outperforming previous methods.

An in-depth investigation of the performance characteristics of Hyperledger Fabric

Private permissioned blockchains are deployed in ever greater numbers to facilitate cross-organizational processes in various industries, particularly in supply chain management. One popular example of this trend is Hyperledger Fabric. Compared to public permissionless blockchains, it promises improved performance and provides certain features that address key requirements of enterprises. However, also permissioned blockchains are still not as scalable as centralized systems, and due to the scarcity of theoretical results and empirical data, their real-world performance cannot be predicted with the necessary precision. We intend to address this issue by conducting an in-depth performance analysis of Hyperledger Fabric. The paper presents a detailed compilation of various performance characteristics using an enhanced version of the Distributed Ledger Performance Scan (DLPS). Researchers and practitioners alike can use the various performance properties identified and discussed as guidelines to better configure and implement their Hyperledger Fabric network. Likewise, they are encouraged to use the DLPS framework to conduct their measurements.

Extracting process hierarchies by multi-sequence alignment adaptations

ABSTRACT Process mining is an active research area that provides a wide range of automated process discovery, conformance checking and process enhancement solutions by extracting process information from event logs. With the emerge of new shared economy models and system architectures, monolithic perspective of process mining, i.e. a single process within a single organisation, is evolved towards cross-organisational business processes. The results can be used to form new collaboration among the organisations and share best practices, business knowledge or a common infrastructure. However, the variability across the cross-organisational process variants constitutes a challenge to deal with, especially at flexible environments. This paper demonstrates a quantitative approach to measure how similar organisations execute the same process. The approach is based on the multi-sequence alignment of dominant behaviour, which is a typical sequence of behaviour recurring at the process cases. Then process clusters are extracted in the form of process hierarchy according to the degree of process similarities. A novel feature of the proposed approach is that branching in process hierarchy reflects how organisations’ behaviours differ from each other. Additionally, common fragments at the aligned process variants within the same cluster pinpoint a functional inheritance or a shared process behaviour for the corresponding organisations. The proposed approach is applied on a real-life case and the comparison with previous alignment techniques reveals the advantages of the approach.

A non-randomised feasibility study of an intervention to optimise medicines at transitions of care for patients with heart failure

BackgroundHeart failure affects 26 million people globally, and the optimal management of medicines is crucial for patients, particularly when their care is transferred between hospital and the community. Optimising clinical outcomes requires well-calibrated cross-organisational processes with staff and patients responding and adapting to medicines changes. The aim of this study was to assess the feasibility of implementing a complex intervention (the Medicines at Transitions Intervention; MaTI) co-designed by patients and healthcare staff. The purpose of the intervention was to optimise medicines management across the gaps between secondary and primary care when hospitals handover care. The study objectives were to (1) assess feasibility through meeting specified progression criteria to proceed to the trial, (2) assess if the intervention was acceptable to staff and patients, and (3) determine whether amendment or refinement would be needed to enhance the MaTI.MethodsThe feasibility of the MaTI was tested in three healthcare areas in the North of England between July and October 2017. Feasibility was measured and assessed through four agreed progression to trial criteria: (1) patient recruitment, (2) patient receipt of a medicines toolkit, (3) transfer of discharge information to community pharmacy, and (4) offer of a community pharmacy medicines review/discussion or medicines reconciliation. From the cardiology wards at each of the three NHS Acute Trusts (sites), 10 patients (aged ≥ 18 years) were recruited and introduced to the ‘My Medicines Toolkit’ (MMT). Patients were asked to identify their usual community pharmacy or nominate a pharmacy. Discharge information was transferred to the community pharmacy; pharmacists were asked to reconcile medicines and invited patients for a medicines use review (MUR) or discussion. At 1 month following discharge, all patients were sent three questionnaire sets: quality-of-life, healthcare utilisation, and a patient experience survey. In a purposive sample, 20 patients were invited to participate in a semi-structured interview about their experiences of the MaTI. Staff from hospital and primary care settings involved in patients’ care were invited to participate in a semi-structured interview. Patient and staff interviews were analysed using Framework Analysis. Questionnaire completion rates were recorded and data were descriptively analysed.ResultsThirty-one patients were recruited across three sites. Eighteen staff and 18 patients took part in interviews, and 19 patients returned questionnaire sets. All four progression to trial criteria were met. We identified barriers to patient engagement with the intervention in hospital, which were compounded by patients’ focus on returning home. Some patients described not engaging in discussions with staff about medicines and lacking motivation to do so because they were preoccupied with returning home. Some patients were unable or unwilling to attend a community pharmacy in person for a medicines review. Roles and responsibilities for delivering the MaTI were different in the three sites, and staff reported variations in time spent on MaTI activities. Staff reported some work pressures and staff absences that limited the time they could spend talking to patients about their medicines. Clinical teams reported that recording a target dose for heart failure medicines in patient-held documentation was difficult as they did not always know the ideal or tolerable dose. The majority of patients reported receiving the patient-held documentation. More than two-thirds reported being offered a MUR by their community pharmacists.ConclusionsDelivery of the Medicines at Transitions Intervention (MaTI) was feasible at all three sites, and progression to trial criteria were met. Refinements were found to be necessary to overcome identified barriers and strengthen delivery of all steps of the intervention. Necessary changes to the MaTI were identified along with amendments to the implementation plan for the subsequent trial. Future implementation needs to take into account the complexity of medicines management and adaptation to local context.

APRM to Isolate Behavior (Frequent or Infrequent) by using Cross-Organizational Process Mining

Process mining is a generally youthful and creating research zone with the primary thought of finding, checking and enhancing forms by removing data from occasion logs. Going out on a limb viewpoint on the business procedure administration (BPM) lifecycle has in this manner been perceived as a fundamental research stream. Notwithstanding significant information on hazard mindful BPM with an attention on process configuration, existing methodologies for real time chance observing regard occurrences as confined when identifying dangers. To address this hole, we propose an approach for Anomaly Predictive - Risk Monitoring (APRM). This approach naturally spreads chance data, which has been identified by means of hazard sensors, crosswise over comparable running occasions of a similar procedure progressively. We show APRMs capacity of prescient hazard checking by applying it with regards to a certifiable situation. With the expansion of distributed computing and shared foundations, occasion logs of various associations are accessible for examination where cross-hierarchical process mining remains with the open door for associations gaining from each other. Created proposal comes about demonstrate that the utilization of this approach can help clients to concentrate on the parts of process models with potential execution change, which are hard to spot physically and outwardly.

A method towards Web service combination for cross-organisational business process using QoS and cluster

ABSTRACTHow to quickly combine various Web services to support cross-organisational business processes is the key technical problem in service computing. Because of the changeability of QoS of Web services, the traditional methods are unadaptable to the new environments. In this paper, a new service composition method, called Improved Self-organising neural network Method for Web Service Composition, is proposed to achieve QoS-aware Web service combination, according to using the clustering technology. First, fuzzy mathematics is used to express each QoS attribute and the improved self-organising neural network is used to cluster services to reduce the number of candidate services. Secondly, all the centre of each cluster is selected and formed a composite service by using an exhaustive algorithm. Thirdly, the service cluster that is represented by the concrete services. Finally, the optimal service combination can be selected using integer programming or genetic algorithm. The experimental result shows the efficiency of Web service composition and demonstrates the applicability.

Human-Centered Model-driven Process and Quality Planning

Process and quality planning are prerequisites for the production of qualified products at competitive cost. Today´s document-based work methods are not effective as valuable time is spent on document creation and document management instead of being spent on innovation and process improvements. Information duplication is an inevitable consequence with current document-based work methods where the same information is described in different ways, at many places, across many different documents. This paper presents a model-driven approach where vital manufacturing information is described once, at one place, and in one way, enabling improved work methods for cross-organizational process and quality planning.

Process Mining in Supply Chains: A Systematic Literature Review

Performance analysis and continuous process improvement efforts are often supported by the construction of process models representing the interactions of the partners in the supply chain. This study was conducted to determine the state of the art in the process mining field, specifically in the context of cross-organizational process. The Systematic Literature Review (SLR) method is used to review a collection of twenty-one papers that are classified according to the Artifact framework of Hevner, et al. and within the Process Mining framework of Van der Aalst. In the reviewed papers, the authors conducted a variety of techniques to establish the event log, which is then used to perform the process mining analysis. Eight of the reviewed papers focus on the definition of concepts or measures. Five of the papers describe models and other abstractions that are used as a theoretical basis for process mining in the context of supply chains. The majority twenty of papers describe some kind of informal method or formal algorithm to perform process mining analysis. Nine of the papers that propose a formal algorithm also present an accompanying software implementation. Eight papers discuss the data preparation challenges and twelve papers discuss process discovery techniques.

Adaptable Cross-organizational Unstructured Business Processes via Dynamic Rule-based Semantic Network

Rapid online adaptation to the new business requirements can improve innovation level and market competency of collaborative organizations. Complex and unstructured processes are provision e-services in collaborative networks through web service inter-connections, which unanticipated changes made it hard to manage them. In a cross-organizational domain, when partners deal with unexpected changes, the received requests are represented as complex theories, and business process adaptation will be more complicated in the occurrence of concept drifts. Rapid prediction and adaptation to new situations need concept drift detection and novel class prediction mechanism for the overall collaborative network processes in both data and control flows. In this article, a new approach to the online reflection of distributed rule concept drifts of collaborative network reference processes is introduced. The solution to the data-informed adaptation of unstructured process employed managing rule concept drifts and cross-organizational processes restructuring via the distributed model with minor updates. The method could react to the new events via an ensemble prediction mechanism. Its architecture has major components for monitoring, dynamic distributed rule reconfiguration, and partners side components. The paper suggests a service-oriented semantic network of distributed rules for e-services provision, substitution, and replacement via management of choreographed web-services. The approach has been validated and verified with real data belonging to the healthcare domain. The results prove the adaptation mechanism efficiency of the daily changes.

How is process mining technology used by organizations? A systematic literature review of empirical studies

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to review empirical studies on process mining in order to understand its use by organizations. The paper further aims to outline future research opportunities.Design/methodology/approachThe authors propose a classification model that combines core conceptual elements of process mining with prior models from technology classification from the enterprise resource planning and business intelligence field. The model incorporates an organizational usage, a system-orientation and service nature, adding a focus on physical services. The application is based on a systematic literature review of 144 research papers.FindingsThe results show that, thus far, the literature has been chiefly concerned with realization of single business process management systems in single organizations. The authors conclude that cross-system or cross-organizational process mining is underrepresented in the ISR, as is the analysis of physical services.Practical implicationsProcess mining researchers have paid little attention to utilizing complex use cases and mining mixed physical-digital services. Practitioners should work closely with academics to overcome these knowledge gaps. Only then will process mining be on the cusp of becoming a technology that allows new insights into customer processes by supplying business operations with valuable and detailed information.Originality/valueDespite the scientific interest in process mining, particularly scant attention has been given by researchers to investigating its use in relatively complex scenarios, e.g., cross-system and cross-organizational process mining. Furthermore, coverage on the use of process mining from a service perspective is limited, which fails to reflect the marketing and business context of most contemporary organizations, wherein the importance of such scenarios is widely acknowledged. The small number of studies encountered may be due to a lack of knowledge about the potential of such scenarios as well as successful examples, a situation the authors seek to remedy with this study.

Cross-Organisational Process Mining in Cloud Environments

Cloud computing market is continually growing in the last years and becoming a new opportunity for business for private and public organisations. The diffusion of multi-tenants distributed systems accessible by clouds leads to the birth of some cross-organisational environments, increasing the organisation efficiency, promoting the business dynamism and reducing the costs. In spite of these advantages, this new business model drives the interest of researchers and practitioners through new critical issues. First of all, the multi-tenant distributed systems need new techniques to improve the traditional resource management distribution along the different tenants. Secondly, new approaches to the process analysis and monitoring analysed since cross-organisational environments allow various organisations to execute the same process in different variants. Hence, information about how each process variant characterised can be collected by the system and stored as process logs. The usefulness of such logs is twofold: these logs can be analysed using some process mining techniques to understand and improve the business processes and can be used to find better resource management and scalability. This paper proposes a cloud computing multi-tenancy architecture to support cross-organisational process executions and improve resource management distribution. Moreover, the approach supports the systematic extraction/composition of distributed data from the system event logs that are assumed to carry information of each process variant. To this aim, the approach also integrates an online process mining technique for the runtime extraction of business rules from event logs. Declarative processes are used to represent process variants running on the analysed infrastructure as they are particularly suited to represent the business process in a context characterised by low predictability and high variability. In this work, we also present a case study where the proposed architecture is implemented and applied to the execution of a real-life process of online products selling.

APRM to Isolate Behavior (Frequent or Infrequent) by using Cross-Organizational Process Mining

APRM to Isolate Behavior (Frequent or Infrequent) by using Cross-Organizational Process Mining

Modelling method of dynamic business process based on pi-calculus

The formal modelling for dynamic business process is to make the collaborative relationship between organisations more detailed and explicit. It is convenient for the people to analyse the structure and interaction of the cross-organisational business process, especially dynamic business process, and assure the optimisation of the system architecture. Based on the channel mobility of pi-calculus, a new modelling method of the dynamic business process is proposed by combining with the extended directed acyclic graph. It is mainly discussed from three aspects: the selection of the interactive paths, the transition of business objects and the validation of accuracy. Meanwhile, a concrete example with multiple roles is presented to assist in the implementation of the method. It concludes that the method can effectively distinguish the collaborative relationship between organisations, and also be used to build formal models of complicated and dynamic business processes with the mature technology.

Towards a formal framework for product level agreements

In the European project IMAGINE we address the problem of cross-organisational processes interoperability in dynamic collaboration environments for product detailed design. By dynamicity, we mean that partners can quit the collaboration and be replaced by other partners at run-time. We first propose to capture the objective of the collaboration, that is reaching agreements between the involved partners on the configurations of the final product components. Successfully capturing agreements contributes to minimising the coupling between partners which reduces the impact of changes in the collaboration environment. Then, from the specification of agreements, we generate the cross-organisational process that automates message exchanges between partners. Nevertheless, the fragments of this cross-organisational process can face interoperability issues during run-time. This issue arises because each process fragment belonging to a partner should be generated while upholding business rules of this partner. Accordingly, we propose an automatic mediation approach that is well-adapted for dynamic collaboration environments. We present the implementation and the evaluation of our framework and an industrial case study is followed to illustrate how our framework can be used in practice.

Patterns and tools for business process monitoring customization

In a cross-organizational service-based process provisioning scenario, one provider is likely to execute a given business process to serve several customers. Each customer may hold different expectations about the way this process can be monitored. We present a solution allowing the provider to support the requirements of different customers on the monitoring of a given process, i.e., offering them the opportunity to customize the way a process will be monitored. We propose a multi-dimensional classification model of patterns for process monitoring and rules to compose the patterns to design customized monitoring infrastructures. The fit for purpose of the patterns is evaluated empirically, whereas the feasibility of our solution is demonstrated by a tool supporting process monitoring customization adhering to our pattern design and composition methodology.

Verification of Change in a Fragmented Event-Based Process Coordination Environment

To allow the distribution of control and visibility of cross-organizational process models and to increase availability and performance of the processes, a process model can be fragmented into logically different parts and distributed in the enterprise architecture. Fragmentation algorithms and execution environments which connect the fragmented process model parts together, recreating the original process execution semantics, have been proposed in earlier works. However, a critical challenge that is left open is the ability to independently change the control structure of a process fragment. This is not trivial as changing the control structure of a specific fragment could break the global process execution. The global process overview is also not available anymore because it is fragmented in the enactment environment and many independent control structure changes could have already been done. In this paper we describe an approach based on state reconstruction which enables to check the admissibility of changes made to the control structure of a process fragment in a fragmented event-based process enactment environment.

A qualitative evaluation of general practitioners’ views on protocol-driven eReferral in Scotland

BackgroundThe ever increasing volume of referrals from primary care to specialist services is putting considerable pressure on resource-constrained health services while effective communication across fragmented services remains a substantial challenge. Previous studies have suggested that electronic referrals (eReferral) can bear important benefits for cross-organisational processes and patient care management.MethodsWe conducted 25 semi-structured interviews and 1 focus group with primary care providers to elucidate General Practitioners’ (GPs) perspectives on information management processes in the patient pathway in NHSScotland, 1 focus group with members of the Scottish Electronic Patient Record programme and one interview with a senior architect of the Scottish Care Information national eReferral System (SCI Gateway). Using Normalisation Process Theory, we performed a qualitative analysis to elucidate GPs’ perspectives on eReferral to identify the factors which they felt either facilitated or hindered referral processes.ResultsThe majority of GPs interviewed felt that eReferral substantially streamlined communication processes, with the immediate transfer of referral documents and the availability of an electronic audit trail perceived as two substantial improvements over paper-based referrals. Most GPs felt that the SCI Gateway system was reasonably straightforward to use. Referral protocols and templates could be perceived as useful by some GPs while others considered them to be cumbersome at times.ConclusionOur study suggests that the deployment and adoption of eReferral across the NHS in Scotland has been achieved by a combination of factors: (i) a policy context – including national mandatory targets for eReferral – which all NHS health-boards were bound to operationalise through their Local Delivery Plans and also (ii) the fact that primary care doctors considered that the overall benefits brought by the deployment of eReferral throughout the patient pathway significantly outweigh any potential disbenefits.

STANDARDS COMPLIANT PLATFORM FOR PRODUCT DESIGN IN DYNAMIC ENVIRONMENTS

^The literature on product-based workflow design considers only static collaborative environments where the product model is static and does not change. However the possible evolution of the product model and thus its impact on the collaborative environment are not considered despite the importance of this evolution for innovative product design. As a result the uncontrolled changes can easily break the cross-organizational process that links the different stakeholders in the collaborative environment. In this paper we present a framework that builds the collaboration contract from the product model and supports a controlled evolution of this contract. We leverage this framework by a set of management operations (services) that enable the contract evolution and investigate how a tailoring operation will not impact the executable cross-organizational process unless this process is maintained executable by the workflow engine. These operations are provided as services by a collaborative platform. Nevertheless, software applications that are provided through services following the Software as a service (SaaS) paradigm generally need to be compliant to some standards. In order to implement our management operations, we need to select the software application that provides the most conformant service interface to a given standard. Accordingly, we develop a formal framework that tests the compliance and reports quantitative results that help experts take the right decision. Unlike existing work that focuses on a single dimension when checking the compliance of a software application with the corresponding standard (for example the functional dimension exclusively, or the syntactic dimension exclusively), in this work we consider multiple dimensions at the same time. This provides more comprehensive results

Attributed Metagraph Modelling to Design Business Process Security Management

Cross organizational process flow is having increasing importance as organizational focus is ooffshoring & outsourcing to develop complex business processes. Utilizing the development otelecommunications frameworks, IT systems are fundamental to collaborating and distributinbusiness processes for both internal as well as external business units. But, this increased dependenexists in an ecosystem of increasing threats to information security along with market sensitivity anregulatory power. Based on recent process flow studies, we explore application of attributmetagraph representation to evaluate process security. Utilizing examples of both risk-analysis andimpact-mitigation, we reveal the effectiveness of attributed metagraph for business process analysMetagraph-based model helps in analysis of as-is processes as well as offers normative direction fprocess remodelling.