Inter-organizational Business Processes Research Articles

Meta Modeling for Business Process Improvement

Conducting business process improvement (BPI) initiatives is a topic of high priority for today’s companies. However, performing BPI projects has become challenging. This is due to rapidly changing customer requirements and an increase of inter-organizational business processes, which need to be considered from an end-to-end perspective. In addition, traditional BPI approaches are more and more perceived as overly complex and too resource-consuming in practice. Against this background, the paper proposes a BPI roadmap, which is an approach for systematically performing BPI projects and serves practitioners’ needs for manageable BPI methods. Based on this BPI roadmap, a domain-specific conceptual modeling method (DSMM) has been developed. The DSMM supports the efficient documentation and communication of the results that emerge during the application of the roadmap. Thus, conceptual modeling acts as a means for purposefully codifying the outcomes of a BPI project. Furthermore, a corresponding software prototype has been implemented using a meta modeling platform to assess the technical feasibility of the approach. Finally, the usability of the prototype has been empirically evaluated.

Introduction: Advances in e-business engineering and management

The term ‘‘e-business’’ was coined by IBM in 1990s, and defined as business activities and processes assisted by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT). In e-commerce sector, according to a recent study, ‘‘Total e-commerce retail sale for 2014 in the US are estimated at $304.9 billion, marking a 15.4 % increase from 2013 sales. In the same time, total retail sales increased just 3.8 %. While e-commerce accounted for 6.5 % of total retail sales in 2014 (5.8 % in 2013), this number is on pace to increase at 14 % compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and will bring its share of the retail market to nearly 9 % by 2017. Not included in these calculations are the billions spent on travel booked online, including airfare, hotels, car rental and travel packages. According to comScore, US e-commerce travel sales were more than $100 billion in 2012, marking a 9 % increase from the previous year’’ [18]. Especially in the new world of IoT, cloud computing and big data science, data, processes, and devices are all converging to reshape how day-to-day business is done. E-business has rapidly evolved, is one of the most exciting and challenging research areas [11, 25, 26]. In such rapid development, new e-business engineering methods and techniques as well as e-business engineering management methods have been developed and applied [2, 5, 10, 13, 15–17, 23, 24]. To respond to the needs from both academic researchers and practitioners for communicating research results on e-business engineering methods and techniques, conference series organized by the IFIP, IEEE and other major research institutions have been developed. These conferences have provided an international forum for researchers in academia and industry to present their most recent findings in e-business engineering. This special issue of Information Technology and Management presents expanded versions of 7 papers from the above-mentioned conferences held recently, focusing on e-business engineering management. To prepare for this issue, all authors were asked to respond to at least two rounds of peer review. Each paper emphasizes the importance of e-business engineering from a unique perspective. Business transactions between different enterprises are more and more executed by a flow of well-defined electronic business documents [22]. However, the structures of these documents may significantly differ depending on industries and regions/areas/countries in which the corresponding inter-organizational business processes are executed [3, 4, 19]. In the paper by Novakovic and Huemer, a novel approach is introduced to apply the contextual knowledge for (semi-) automatically generating semantically interoperable data building blocks, so-called Core Components, comprised by electronic business documents. These documents conform to the Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) which is proposed by the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) [14]. With the development of global economic integration, technology standards have become increasingly important for business, industries, and e-business [21]. The paper entitled ‘‘Interaction between technology standardization and technology development: a coupling effect study’’ aims to extend the study about the interaction between technology standardization and technology development. & Li Da Xu lxu@odu.edu

Technology induced competitive advantage: a case of US lodging industry

Purpose– The purpose of this research is to assist hospitality organizations to better deploy and manage their information technology (IT) resources and enhance overall effectiveness by demonstrating how technologies can be used as a competitive weapon at various levels from a managerial perspective. Both academia and practitioners attempt to understand the driving factors of IT-induced competitive advantage. While some firms enjoy competitive advantage through IT, others struggle to gain such competitive advantage.Design/methodology/approach– AHLA E-Commerce and Technology Committee members were interviewed for their knowledge and insight toward the perceived problem. The committee comprises technology executives who meet twice per year to discuss the changing face of technology and e-business in the hospitality industry. Participants of this study consisted of vice presidents, CTO/CIOs of hotels, CEOs of hospitality technology vendors and academics who focus on hospitality technology research.Findings– Findings indicate that IT-induced competitive advantage is possible when hotels choose to integrate all the possible technologies in the organization with a harmony that creates synergy. To create IT-induced competitive advantage, firms also need to allocate resources (human, knowledge and capital) effectively and invest in innovative and sophisticated technologies.Research limitations/implications– IT can be used to create competitive advantage by means of differentiation, innovation, channel domination, cost reductions and efficiency improvements.Practical implications– Four distinct stages of IT usage were identified. The first is the operation stage which includes technologies that are solely used to manage daily business operations. The second is the enhancement stage where IT applications are used to increase productivity and efficiency. IT applications at the strategic stage improves intra-organization and inter-organizational business processes. Finally, IT applications at the transformation stage enable companies to achieve the maximum competitive advantage.Originality/value– The current research serves to fill the gap between academia and industry.

CTL Model Repair for Inter-organizational Business Processes Modelled as oWFN

Abstract Computation tree logic (CTL) model repair is an approach that extends the model checking technique to obtain new admissible models that can represent the correct design of business processes. Open workflow nets (oWFN) have shown to be adequate to model inter-organizational business processes; this formalism allows performing formal analysis such as model checking. In this work, we adapt a CTL model repair method for bounded and deadlock free Petri nets, to enable it to work with oWFN. The method is illustrated through an example of a placing purchase order process updated by adding a new supplier.

Disciplining and Custodianship: How Big Data Shapes Inter-Organizational Relationships

The introduction of big data systems to inter-organizational business processes changes the practices and nature of inter-organizational relationships. Big data technology enables a faster, cheaper, and more exact exchange of information between the organizations. Existing theory on inter-organizational relationships and firm boundaries fails to adequately explain these changes. In this comparative multiple case study we discover two new inter-organizational practices. Asymmetries of competence between long-term collaborative partner firms drive the adoption of disciplining and custodianship practices. In both, great amounts of new information is exchanged across organizational boundaries in novel processes, accompanied by substantial modifications in task configurations. As a result, firm boundaries of information, power, and competences shift. We contribute to theory in three ways. First, we advance theory of collaborative long-term inter-organizational relationships by demonstrating how big data makes inter-firm governance more responsive and calculative. Second, we further theory of organizational boundaries by revealing how the changes in information, power, and competence are strongly interdependent. Third, we add to the understanding of the effects of big data on management processes.

Performance Evaluation of Inter-Organizational Business Processes Based on Petri Nets

Performance Evaluation of Inter-Organizational Business Processes Based on Petri Nets

Analyzing inter-organizational business processes

Companies are increasingly embedded in B2B environments, where they have to collaborate in order to achieve their goals. Such collaborations lead to inter-organizational business processes that may be commonly supported through the exchange of electronic data interchange (EDI) messages (e.g., electronic purchase orders, invoices etc.). Despite the appearance of XML, traditional approaches to EDI, such as EDIFACT and ANSI X.12, still play an overwhelmingly dominant role. However, such traditional EDI standards lack a notion of process. In other words, the exchanged business documents are typically not embedded in the context of other exchanged business documents. This has two shortcomings: (1) the inability to apply proven business process management (BPM) methods, including process mining techniques, in such settings; and (2) the unavailability of systematic approaches to business intelligence (BI) using information from exchanged EDI messages. In this article, we present the EDImine Framework for enabling (1) the application of process mining techniques in the field of EDI-supported inter-organizational business processes, and (2) for supporting inter-organizational performance evaluation using business information from EDI messages, event logs and process models. As an enabling technology, we present a method for the semantic preprocessing of EDIFACT messages to exploit this potentially rich source of information by applying state of the art BPM and BI techniques. We show the applicability of our approach by means of a case study based on real-world EDI data of a German consumer goods manufacturing company.

Inter-organizational business process verification in public administration

Purpose – Public services can be modelled, analysed and implemented using notations and tools for the business process (BP) abstraction. Applying such an explicit approach public administrations (PAs) can better react to the undergoing transformation in service provisioning and they can continuously improve service quality in order to satisfy citizens and business requests, while coping with decreasing budgets. The purpose of this paper is to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed approach relies on using formal methods, in particular unfolding to analyse the correctness of BP. The paper also compares and selects mapping rules from semi-formal to formal modelling languages; these techniques are presented in the context of the BP Modelling Languages and Petri Net (PN). Findings – Main aim of this paper is to raise the need for formal verification of BP governing the interactions among PAs, which more and more need to be supported by ICT mechanisms, and then are not so much tolerant to errors and imperfections in the process specification. The paper illustrates the main motivations of such a work and it introduces a verification technique of a BP using a mapping of a high-level notation (such as BPMN 2.0) to a formal notation (such as PNs) for which formal analysis techniques can be adopted. In particular the verification step is implemented using an unfolding-based technique. Originality/value – The paper answers a call for further development of the body of knowledge on effective analysis of BPs, a rapidly emerging field of interest for large and ultra large scenarios, where a clear gap in literature exists. Than the paper shows that formal techniques are mature enough to be applied on real scenarios.

Co-NP-Hardness of the Soundness Problem for Asymmetric-Choice Workflow Nets

van der Aalst et al. proved that the soundness problem is solvable in polynomial time for free-choice workflow nets (FCWF-nets). However, FCWF-nets cannot model most web services composition and interorganizational business processes because the interaction among processes does not usually satisfy the free-choice requirement. Asymmetric-choice workflow nets (ACWF-nets) as a larger class than FCWF-nets can model lots of such cases. Our previous work showed that the (weak) soundness problem is co-NP-hard for three-bounded ACWF-nets. Later, Tiplea et al. proved that for three-bounded acyclic ACWF-nets, the weak soundness problem is co-NP-complete. We sharp these results in this paper. First, we prove that for ACWF-nets, whether they are one-bounded or ${k}$ -bounded ( ${k}~\boldsymbol {>} 1$ ), the soundness problem is co-NP-hard. Second, it is proven that the soundness is equivalent to the weak soundness for any acyclic ACWF-nets, i.e., an acyclic ACWF-net is sound if and only if it is weakly sound.

Using intentional fragments to bridge the gap between organizational and intentional levels

ContextBusiness process models provide a natural way to describe real-world processes to be supported by software-intensive systems. These models can be used to analyze processes in the system-as-is and describe potential improvements for the system-to-be. But, how well does a given business process model satisfy its business goals? How can different perspectives be integrated in order to describe an inter-organizational process? ObjectiveThe aim of the present paper is to link the local and the global perspectives of the inter-organizational business process defined in BPMN 2.0 (Business Process Model and Notation) to KAOS goal models (Keep All Objectives Satisfied). We maintain a separation of concerns between the intentional level captured by the goal model and the organizational level captured by the process model. The paper presents the concept of intentional fragment (a set of flow elements of the process with a common purpose) and assess its usefulness. MethodWe conducted empirical experiments where the proposed concepts – here the intentional fragments – are validated by users. Our method relies on an iterative improvement process led by users feedback. ResultsWe find that the concept of intentional fragment is useful for (1) analyzing the business process model (2) reasoning about the relations between the goal model and the business process model and (3) identifying new goals. In a previous work we focused on BPMN 2.0 collaboration models (local view). This paper extends the previous work by integrating the global view given by choreography models in the approach. ConclusionWe conclude that the notion of intentional fragment is a useful mean to relate business process models and goal models while dealing with their different nature (activity oriented vs goal oriented). Intentional fragments can also be used to analyze the process model and to infer new goals in an iterative manner.

A view framework for modeling and change validation of artifact-centric inter-organizational business processes

Over the past several years, more efficient approaches have been on increasing demands for designing, modeling, and implementing inter-organizational business processes. In the process collaboration across organizational boundaries, organizations still stay autonomic, which means each organization can freely modify its internal operations to meet its private goals while satisfying the mutual objectives with its partners. Recently, artifact-centric process modeling has been evidenced with higher flexibility in process modeling and execution than traditional activity-centric modeling methods. Although some efforts have been put to exploring how artifact-centric modeling facilitates the collaboration between organizations, the achievement is still far from satisfaction level, particularly in aspects of process modeling and validating. To fill in the gaps, we propose a view framework for modeling and validating the changes of inter-organizational business processes. The framework consists of an artifact-centric process meta-model, public view constructing mechanism, and private view and change validating mechanisms, which are specially designed to facilitate the participating organizations to customize their internal operations while ensuring the correctness of the collaborating processes. We also implement a software tool named Artifact-M to help organizations to automatically construct a minimal and consistent public view from their processes.

A reference architecture for managing dynamic inter-organizational business processes

For improving the efficiency and effectiveness of business collaboration, the need emerges to inter-organizationally match e-business services. Recent research activities show heightened attention into that direction with the ecosystems-emergence of service-oriented computing clouds. As this increases the business-, conceptual-, and technical governance complexity, a need exists for using a reference architecture to evaluate and design standard-, and concrete architectures for business-to-business (B2B) collaboration. In this paper, we fill that gap by presenting the eSourcing Reference Architecture eSRA that emerges from B2B-research projects and we check this with a scenario-based validation method. We demonstrate how eSRA enables a quick evaluation of not only research-based B2B-architectures but also of industry application suits. That way, we show the usability and applicability in that with the help of eSRA, system designers directly establish a comprehensive understanding of fundamental B2B concepts and develop higher-quality domain-specific architectures.

Co-creating business value of information technology

Purpose– IT-based supply chain performance is co-created through inter-organizational business processes. This research is motivated to explore how business value of IT in supply chain is co-created in downstream process and probe into the possible complementary effect of relational resources from retailers and customers during the cooperative process. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approach– A model is proposed to conceptualize the process with three dimensions and six constructs, which emerges a causal link between organization resources application, e-supply chain capability (ESCC) and process performance. And then the research model was validated using partial least squares with data collected from 128 manufacturing firms in China.Findings– The results provide broad support for the following: the casual relationship among inter-organizational resources interaction, ESCC and process performance; the mediating role of ESCC in the e-CRM process is more significant than that in e-ordering process; and there is the moderating effect between relational resources and internal resources in e-CRM process.Practical implications– It offers guidelines for managers to plan the roles played by resource, capabilities and performance for e-supply chain success in multi-firm environments.Originality/value– This study provides a novel perspective and offers important implications for e-supply chain research and practice, by exploring intermediate factors and shedding light on the process of co-creating business value of IT in supply chain.

Coordination of Local Process Views in Interorganizational Business Process

SUMMARY Collaborative business has been increasingly developing with the environment of globalization and advanced information technologies. In a collaboration environment with multiple organizations, participants from different organizations always have different views about modeling the overall business process due to different knowledge and cultural backgrounds. Moreover, flexible support, privacy preservation and process reuse are important issues that should be considered in business process management across organizational boundaries. This paper presents a novel approach of modeling interorganizational business process for collaboration. Our approach allows for modeling loosely coupled interorganizational business process considering different views of organizations. In the proposed model, organizations have their own local process views of modeling business process instead of sharing pre-defined global processes. During process cooperation, local process of an organization can be invisible to other organizations. Further, we propose the coordination mechanisms for different local process views to detect incompatibilities among organizations. We illustrate our proposed approach by a case study of interorganizational software development collaboration.

Networked Business Process Management

In the current economy, a shift can be seen from stand-alone business organizations to networks of tightly collaborating business organizations. To allow this tight collaboration, business process management in these collaborative networks is becoming increasingly important. This paper discusses automated support for this networked business process management: automated means to manage business processes that span multiple autonomous organizations. The author starts this paper with a treatment of intra- and inter-organizational business processes to provide a conceptual background for business process management in business networks. The author describes a number of research approaches in this area, including the context of these approaches and the architectures of the automated systems proposed by them. The approaches are described from early developments in the field relying on dedicated technology to current designs based on standardized technology in a service-oriented context. The paper thereby provides an overview of developments in the area of inter-organizational business process management in the spectrum from simple, static business networks to complex, dynamic networks. The author observes that the described BPM research efforts move from pushing new BPM technology into application domains to using BPM to realize business-IT alignment in complex application contexts.

An approach based on constraint satisfaction problems to disruptive event management in supply chains

This work introduces a generalized model for evaluating and restoring feasibility in the execution of supply chain processes. The model was designed to provide automation to the disruption management function of Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) systems. The repair mechanism is based on a constraint satisfaction problem that can be automatically instantiated from self-contained descriptions of the ongoing schedules without previous knowledge of the supply chain structure. The proposed mechanism intends to make surgical modifications to the current schedule which do not affect the economical and operational considerations and the allowed changes are limited to the space of slacks already included by the original schedule. This level of repair can be safely delegated to automated systems and would facilitate the design of collaborative inter-organizational business processes to manage events along the supply chain. A case study validates the applicability of the proposed models. ► A general constraint satisfaction problem is able to evaluate the feasibility of supply chain schedules. ► An automated mechanism to repair disrupted supply processes using scheduled buffers. ► A reference model for disruptive events management in supply chains is introduced.

Adoption and Impacts of Interorganizational Business Process Standards: Role of Partnering Synergy

Notwithstanding potential benefits, such as quality of interorganizational relationships and operational and strategic gains, adoption of information technology (IT)-enabled interorganizational business process standards (IBPS) is still limited. Given that these standards are designed for interorganizational business processes, we suggest that adoption of these standards depends not only on the factors pertinent to a focal firm but also on factors that represent synergies between a focal firm and its trading partners. In this paper, building on the technological, organizational, and environmental (TOE) framework and interorganizational theories, we propose a model that postulates that a set of TOE factors will have synergistic effects (i.e., interactions between a focal firm's and its partner's factors) on IBPS adoption. We tested our model in a study of 248 firms (124 dyads) in the high-tech industry implementing RosettaNet-based IBPS and found that three TOE factors (i.e., process compatibility, standards uncertainty, and technology readiness) had synergistic effects and two factors (i.e., expected benefits and relational trust) had direct effects on IBPS adoption. We also found that IBPS adoption led to greater relationship quality (i.e., partnering satisfaction) and operational efficiency (i.e., cycle time). Further, we found that IBPS adoption mediated the effect of TOE factors on partnering satisfaction and cycle time.

About Our Authors

About Our Authors

A Deadlock Detection Method for Inter-organizational Business Process Based on Role Network Model

In the context of inter-organizational business collaboration, structural deadlock detection is an important means of guaranteeing the correctness of an inter-organizational business process model. The existing deadlock detection methods have limitations in handling some aspects of the dynamics and uncertainty arising from inter-organizational nature of the processes. Role Network Model (RNM) was proposed to model knowledge intensive systems and can better represent the dynamic aspects of business processes using roles. But RNM is weak in the explicit description of business processes. Therefore, an extended Directed Acyclic Graph is proposed to better describe the process side complementing RNM. Second, some extended reduction rules targeting process dynamics are proposed to reduce the complexity. Third, a deadlock detection method is proposed to support highly dynamic processes. At both simulation phase and/or run time, deadlock detection and reduction can be performed step by step. The proposed method can not only improve the efficiency of deadlock detection but also find some deadlocks before all the uncertainties are determined. Finally, through a case study, the result demonstrates that this method can effectively achieve deadlock detection for inter-organizational business processes including dynamic and uncertain business processes.

Ensuring reliability in B2B services: Fault tolerant inter-organizational workflows

In the age of Business-to-Business (B2B) collaboration, ensuring reliability of workflows underlying inter-organizational business processes is of significant importance. There are, however, quite a few challenges towards achieving seamless operation. Such challenges arise from heterogeneity in infrastructure and coordination mechanism at participant organizations, as well as time and cost associated with recovery from failure. Our research presents foundations for a reliable scheme for recovery from failure of workflow processes spanning through multiple business entities. First, a system model is adapted from the mobile computing literature that serves to establish the requirements to be enforced by each participating organization. In our model, we adopt the Maximal Sequence Path (MSP) approach from Yoo et al. (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence 2132:222---236, 2001), as a means of decomposing workflows into mobile agent-driven processes that communicate via web services at each organization. This decomposition ensures defining logical points within the dynamics of a workflow instance for locating accurate and consistent states of the system for recovery in case of a failure. Then, a set of algorithms for various business scenarios are developed and presented as practical solutions. These algorithms are shown to create checkpoints such that the system is always in a globally consistent state. As such, these algorithms constitute a set of standards that can be incorporated in business process management suites that support reliable inter-organizational collaboration.