Large Business Processes Research Articles

BPO Ecosystem in North East India: Reclaiming the Missed Opportunity

North Eastern Region (NER) of India is largely looked upon as a provider of cheaper and amenable workforce for the business process outsourcing (BPO) industry, with neutral accent, dedication and hospitable behaviour. All these factors make NER a potential BPO destination, further enhanced by different government (central/states) policy initiatives. However, the industry in the regions exhibited an almost flat growth curve over the years, and thus there is a need for understanding the reasons behind the failure of the undertaken policies. This study is largely based on qualitative research on the large information technology and business process management (IT-BPM) industry of India in general and (still) nascent BPO industry of NER in particular. The authors’ understanding and findings are inferred from review of policy documents, numerous data sources and discussions, focus group interviews with national BPO experts, and local BPO entrepreneurs of the region. The impact of coronavirus disease-2019 on the business process management (BPM) industry and the opportunities arising from it, particularly for this region has also been examined. The study presents a set of factors paralysing the industry in NER, and outlines some affirmative measures to rectify the failures. This analysis, though specific to the NER, highlights the issues involved in BPO operations which can be generalised and provide guidelines to other destinations.

M-PoP: leveraging the systematic modeling of processes-of-business processes

PurposeThis paper presents M-PoP, a method to model large, complex, and dynamic business processes. These processes have sometimes resulted from alliances of organizations (i.e. joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions) and are referred to as Processes-of-Business Processes (PoP). Due to the difficulty of modeling these dynamic processes, alliances of organizations have often lost opportunities, competitiveness, and profitability, so requiring suitable modeling methods.Design/methodology/approachThe authors proposed M-PoP that can model PoP through three views in different abstraction levels and using well-known techniques in industry and academia, mainly those from Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). For this, M-PoP presents three main steps: identification of PoP elements, modeling of PoP, and verification of PoP models. To evaluate M-PoP, we applied it in a real-world business process in the health domain.FindingsThe evaluation results point out the capability and viability of M-PoP to deal with dynamic business processes.Research limitations/implicationsM-PoP still needs to be applied in various real-world scenarios to gather evidence of its productivity, efficiency, and scalability.Practical implicationsThis novel method could change the way organizations model their business processes and, as a consequence, it could leverage strategic business opportunities.Originality/valueM-PoP is the first method that makes it possible to model large and complex business processes and, most importantly, dynamic processes.

Optimizing Autonomic Resources for the Management of Large Service-Based Business Processes

Cloud Computing, as a distributed computing paradigm, consists of the provisioning of infrastructure, platform, and software resources as services. This paradigm is being increasingly used for the deployment and execution of service-based business processes. To efficiently manage them according to the autonomic computing paradigm, service-based business processes can be associated with autonomic managers that monitor these processes, analyze monitoring data, plan configuration actions, and execute these actions on these processes. Although, during these last years, autonomic management of cloud services has received increasing attention, the optimization of autonomic managers to be assigned to cloud services remains not well explored. In fact, almost all the existing solutions on autonomic computing have been interested in modeling and implementing autonomic mechanisms without making any effort to optimize the number of used autonomic managers. Moreover, when it comes to large service-based business processes, optimization of management resources becomes a critical issue. To overcome this issue, we present in this paper a novel approach to determine how many autonomic managers to use for the management of large service-based business processes in order to minimize their cost while avoiding management bottlenecks. Experiments conducted on three different types of datasets highlight the effectiveness of our approach.

Towards a trustworthy RFID system - from a security perspective

This paper presents a comprehensive, layered framework for a trustworthy radio frequency identification (RFID) system, which has been applied in various fields such as supply chain management, inventory tracking, healthcare, transportation and logistics, manufacturing, library, agriculture, payment and asset management. RFID provides real-time data and analytics, which allow organisations to have more accurate information at all time for improved decision making. Our proposed framework addresses technical challenges of building trustworthy RFID systems given the resource-constricted RFID components as well as high mobility and sensitivity of RFID devices. The framework offers the following merits: 1) it can be used in vastly distributed environment to support large scope RFID-enabled business processes; 2) it is appropriate for resource-restricted RFID system components; 3) it provides users with the most trustworthy information about RFID tagged items despite malicious attacks; 4) it can tolerate attacks at RFID system level and higher-application level.

Adaptive business rules framework for workflow management

PurposeChanging scattered and dynamic business rules in business workflow systems has become a growing problem that hinders the use and configuration of workflow-based applications. There is a gap in the existing research studies which currently focus on solutions that are application specific, without accounting for the universal logical dependencies between the business rules and, as a result, do not support adaptation of the business rules in real time. The paper aims to discuss this issue.Design/methodology/approachTo tackle the above problems, this paper adopts a bottom-up approach, which puts forward a component model of the business process workflows and then adds business rules which have clear logical semantics. This allows incremental development of the workflows and semantic indexing of the rules which govern them during the initial acquisition.FindingsThe paper introduces an event-driven model for development of business workflows which is purely logic-based and can be easily implemented using an object-oriented technology, together with a model of the business rules dependencies which supports incremental semantic indexing. It also proposes a two-level inference mechanism as a vehicle for controlling the business process execution and the process of adaptation of the business rules at real time based on propagating the dependencies.Research limitations/implicationsThe framework is strictly logical and completely domain-independent. It allows to account both synchronous and asynchronous triggering events as well as both qualitative and quantitative description of the conditions of the rules. Although our primary interest is to apply the framework to the business processes typical in the construction industry we believe our approach has much wider potential due to its strictly logical formalization and domain independence. In fact it can be used to control any business processes where the execution is governed by rules.Practical implicationsThe framework could be applied to both large business process modelling tasks and small but very dynamic business processes like the typical digital business processes found in online banking or e-Commerce. For example, it can be used for adjusting security policies by adding the capability to adapt automatically the access rights to account for additional resources and new channels of operation which can be very interesting ion both B2C and B2B applications.Social implicationsThe potential scope of the impact of the research reported here is linked to the wide applicability of rule-based systems in business. Our approach makes it possible not only to control the execution of the processes, but also to identify problems in the control policies themselves from the point of view of their logical properties – consistency, redundancies and potential gaps in the logics. In addition to this, our approach not only increases the efficiency, but also provides flexibility for adaptation of the policies in real time and increases the security of the overall control which improves the overall quality of the automation.Originality/valueThe major achievement reported in this paper is the construction of a universal, strictly logic-based event-driven framework for business process modelling and control, which allows purely logical analysis and adaptation of the business rules governing the business workflows through accounting their dependencies. An added value is the support for object-oriented implementation and the incremental indexing which has been possible thanks to the bottom-up approach adopted in the construction of the framework.

Economic performance study of the integrated MR-SOFC-CCHP system

The fossil energy crisis is a great test for human society, and the technology of methanol reforming for hydrogen fuel cell has attracted much attention. Based on Aspen Plus - the large business process simulation software, this paper constructs a distributed energy system based on solar methanol reforming SOFC. It is combined with GT-ST power generation system and AHP-AR. We optimized the design of system integration mode, and the steady-state model of thermal calculation of the system is constructed. The calculation results show that, power, heating and cooling output of MR-SOFC-CCHP system are 226.9 kW, 46.6 kW and 36.4 kW respectively under design conditions. The power output efficiency and thermal efficiency were 59.7% and 81.6% respectively. System annual profit: 517,000 yuan/year. Compared with the annual profit of CCHP system of 275,000 yuan per year, its annual profit is increased by 242,000 yuan/year. The investment payback period of MR-SOFC-CCHP system decreases with the decrease of SOFC price. With the price of SOFC reduced from 50,000 yuan/kW to 15,000 yuan/kW, the investment payback period of MR-SOFC-CCHP system decreased from 14.0 to 5.8 years.

Recalling the rationale of change from process model revision comparison – A change-pattern based approach

Industrial enterprises embody a rather large and heterogeneous business process landscape including hundreds to thousands of both manufacturing and supporting processes. To keep records of their business process architecture enterprises use informal and as well formal process descriptions. Formal process descriptions are often referred to as process models and are gaining increasing importance as a basis for process-aware enterprise information systems and automation purposes. Therefore process models are continuously adapted to changing business requirements. Keeping track of model changes is an important requirement to be able to understand past decisions and their impact on the process landscape. Hence, keeping track of changes is not easy if changes are not associated with the original rationale and the order of atomic changes is not preserved anymore. In this paper we present an approach that builds upon the concept of change patterns. For this purpose we systematically examined revision histories from a large process model collection and described them through a pattern language. In addition, we propose an algorithm to detect such change patterns. Our approach has been implemented in a modeling environment and has been evaluated with regard to effectiveness and performance.

Serbian Large Agribusiness Corporations Knocking at the Door of E-Agribusiness Revolution

Transformation of large agribusiness corporations in Serbia is at its beginning. Institutional investors are taking control of these firms through foreign direct investments. Corporate reorganization of agribusinesses starts up by introducing efficient management, information technology, Net and e-commerce. IT environment generates a new business model, which creates connections in Serbia between the large agribusinesses, business processes and IT. The market of agricultural production in Serbia is rapidly changing and adapting itself to the global trends, mainly to the Internet economy. The speed of transactions and volume of information is increasing dramatically. It is important to explain the basic economic principles at macro and micro levels. Such revolutionary changes affect the operations and management of agribusiness on the Internet and outside of it. The purpose of this work is to stimulate further research in these processes, and to use the acquired knowledge as a tool for efficient corporate agribusiness management.

Examining relationships among corporate ethical values, commitment and turnover intentions

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship of corporate ethical values (CEV) on the work attitudes linked to the organizational behavior of employees. It primarily focusses on examining the relationship of CEV with organizational commitment (OC) and the turnover intention (TI) of employees. Design/methodology/approach – Study undertakes an explanatory analysis on a sample of 150 employees from large and medium scale Indian Information Technology Business Process Outsourcing firms. Findings – Results of the study revealed significant relationships among the variables. Strong positive association has been found between CEV and commitment, whereas, contrasting result has been found with TI of employees. CEV explained 22 percent and 23 percent of variance in commitment and TI, respectively. Moreover, the relationship of ethical values and TIs has been found to be mediated through OC. Practical implications – Study enables the managers to understand wider impact of ethics in an organization and its positive impact on employees in increasing their commitment levels. Managers should focus on the ethical aspects of conducting business to ensure that the employees are well engaged with their employer and have the least tendency to shift when given an opportunity. Originality/value – This research attempts to bridge the gap in the existing literature by explaining relationship among variables (CEV, OC and TI) in context to the South-Asian nations, and especially India.

Leveraging big-data for business process analytics

Purpose – This paper aims to present a solution that enables organizations to monitor and analyse the performance of their business processes by means of Big Data technology. Business process improvement can drastically influence in the profit of corporations and helps them to remain viable. However, the use of traditional Business Intelligence systems is not sufficient to meet today ' s business needs. They normally are business domain-specific and have not been sufficiently process-aware to support the needs of process improvement-type activities, especially on large and complex supply chains, where it entails integrating, monitoring and analysing a vast amount of dispersed event logs, with no structure, and produced on a variety of heterogeneous environments. This paper tackles this variability by devising different Big-Data-based approaches that aim to gain visibility into process performance. Design/methodology/approach – Authors present a cloud-based solution that leverages (BD) technology to provide essential insights into business process improvement. The proposed solution is aimed at measuring and improving overall business performance, especially in very large and complex cross-organisational business processes, where this type of visibility is hard to achieve across heterogeneous systems. Findings – Three different (BD) approaches have been undertaken based on Hadoop and HBase. We introduced first, a map-reduce approach that it is suitable for batch processing and presents a very high scalability. Secondly, we have described an alternative solution by integrating the proposed system with Impala. This approach has significant improvements in respect with map reduce as it is focused on performing real-time queries over HBase. Finally, the use of secondary indexes has been also proposed with the aim of enabling immediate access to event instances for correlation in detriment of high duplication storage and synchronization issues. This approach has produced remarkable results in two real functional environments presented in the paper. Originality/value – The value of the contribution relies on the comparison and integration of software packages towards an integrated solution that is aimed to be adopted by industry. Apart from that, in this paper, authors illustrate the deployment of the architecture in two different settings.

Change Propagation and Conflict Resolution for the Co-Evolution of Business Processes

In large organizations, multiple stakeholders may modify the same business process. This paper addresses the problem when stakeholders perform changes on process views which become inconsistent with the business process and other views. Related work addressing this problem is based on execution trace analysis which is performed in a post-analysis phase and can be complex when dealing with large business process models. In this paper, we propose a design-based approach that can efficiently check consistency criteria and propagate changes on-the-fly from a process view to its reference process and related process views. The technique is based on consistent specialization of business processes and supports the control flow aspect of processes. Consistency checks can be performed during the design time by checking simple rules which support an efficient change propagation between views and reference process.

Foundational MDA Patterns for Service-Oriented Computing .

As the foundation of EDI, B2C and B2B, distributed comput- ing is a key enabler for today's enterprises and will become even more important with the advent of cloud computing on the one hand and an ever more agile work organization on the other hand. Whilst the rapid evolution of distributed computing technologies in the last three decades has delivered a rich set of platforms and paradigms for building robust enterprise systems, it has also left a legacy of unresolved problems includ- ing fundamental inconsistencies between the concepts of the two leading distributed computing paradigms, i.e., distributed object computing and service-oriented architecture. Equally important, there is a growing need to lower the complexities and barriers involved in developing client appli- cations, which range from large scale business applications and business processes to laptop programs and small apps on mobile devices. In this article, we present a unified conceptual framework for service-oriented computing based on the proven MDA (Model Driven Architecture) ter- minology stack. With the conceptual framework we consolidate, and give semantics to, core concepts of service-oriented computing and provide a set of foundational model transformation patterns that map between the presented concepts and further clarify practical service-oriented comput- ing scenarios. Finally, we show how the developed framework perfectly fits to the OSM (Orthographical Software Modeling) approach.

Consistent Abstraction of Business Processes Based on Constraints

Exploring and understanding large business process models are important tasks in the context of business process management. In recent years, several techniques have been proposed for the abstraction of business processes. Automated abstraction techniques have been devised for verifying correctness and consistency of process models and for providing customised process views for business process analysts. Yet a goal-focused and semantic-based approach to generate purposeful abstraction of business processes is an open issue. We propose an approach for configuration of process abstractions with respect to a specific abstraction goal expressed as constraints on the correspondence relation between concrete and abstract process and process transformation operators. Our framework goes beyond simple structural aggregation and leverages domain-specific properties, taxonomies, meronymy, and flow criteria to generate a hierarchy of abstract process models. We outline the constraint-based framework, describe how rewriting-based abstraction mechanisms are embedded with consistency criteria guiding the search for abstractions, and show how notions of behaviour consistency can be utilised to obtain abstractions that conform to behavioural process inheritance criteria.

OUTSOURCING AND MARKET VALUE OF THE FIRM: TOWARD A COMPREHENSIVE MODEL

SUMMARYWe analyze the effect of buyer, contract, and vendor characteristics on abnormal stock returns among firms that have announced large scale Information Technology (IT) and Business Process outsourcing (BPO) contracts. We draw upon a comprehensive dataset on outsourcing announcements, augmented with data from public sources. Salient buyer factors examined include use of a wide range of organizational controls. On the vendor side, we examine the impact of vendor size, contract size and reputation. Our study shows that use of behavior controls, outcome controls (negative), vendor reputation, and industry of buyer firm affect market value. When limited to buyer related factors, use of behavior and clan controls is positively related to abnormal returns around IT outsourcing announcements. An interesting finding is that IT and BPO success require different sets of controls. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Monitoring business constraints with the event calculus

Today, large business processes are composed of smaller, autonomous, interconnected subsystems, achieving modularity and robustness. Quite often, these large processes comprise software components as well as human actors, they face highly dynamic environments and their subsystems are updated and evolve independently of each other. Due to their dynamic nature and complexity, it might be difficult, if not impossible, to ensure at design-time that such systems will always exhibit the desired/expected behaviors. This, in turn, triggers the need for runtime verification and monitoring facilities. These are needed to check whether the actual behavior complies with expected business constraints, internal/external regulations and desired best practices. In this work, we present Mobucon EC, a novel monitoring framework that tracks streams of events and continuously determines the state of business constraints. In Mobucon EC, business constraints are defined using the declarative language Declare. For the purpose of this work, Declare has been suitably extended to support quantitative time constraints and non-atomic, durative activities. The logic-based language Event Calculus (EC) has been adopted to provide a formal specification and semantics to Declare constraints, while a light-weight, logic programming-based EC tool supports dynamically reasoning about partial, evolving execution traces. To demonstrate the applicability of our approach, we describe a case study about maritime safety and security and provide a synthetic benchmark to evaluate its scalability.

Research on Collaborative Mechanism in Large and Complex Business Process Modeling

Large-scale and complicated business process modeling is not supported by traditional single-designer business process modeling tools. This paper investigates a collaborative business process modeling method based on top-down pattern, where the conflict issue in collaboration is explicitly accounted for. An access control mechanism is proposed and four rules of locking up are defined to restrict designers access to models. Then the locks impact on efficiency of collaborative modeling is deeply studied. At last an integrated multi-designer modeling system IPro is developed based on the above collaborative mechanism and applied to several business process modeling projects in aviation industry to validate the mechanism.

Web service execution model for cloud environment

Web services describe a standardized way of integrating Web-based applications. In recent days, with the advancement of cloud computing, web services play pivoting roles towards meeting complex business objectives on a large scale. However, engineering dynamic web services is a complex task as they can be added, modified and deleted on the fly and even without any prior notification. Executing a large scale business process using dynamic web services is very challenging. This paper proposes an execution machine, called Web Service Dynamic Execution Machine ( WSDE machine), which works in the execution layer of the three layered architecture for web service dynamics [23]. The proposed machine is capable of executing business processes having both deterministic and non-deterministic flows, where the related web services are represented using a graph-based semantic based formal model. The generic nature of the WSDE machine is useful in improving performance, scalability and maintainability of large scale web service based information systems. In this paper, the proposed WSDE machine is also illustrated with a suitable case study.

Research and design of lightweight workflow model based on improved activity-on-vertex network

For the deficiency when the existing workflow models deal with large and complex system,the concept of lightweight model was introduced and a lightweight workflow model based on improved Activity-On-Vertex(AOV) network was proposed to meet the requirements of the large and complex business process in workflow management.While the detailed definition and design of this model were presented,two critical algorithms in process scheduling,scheduling algorithm for branch points and synchronization algorithm for convergent points,were given to ensure the accurate operation of the process.The lightweight advantage of this model was reflected through the analysis of a concrete example's workflow modeling.Using graph theory to do static and dynamic verification on this model,it proves that this model is reasonable.

A model-driven method for enacting the design-time QoS analysis of business processes

Business Process Management (BPM) is a holistic approach for describing, analyzing, executing, managing, and improving large enterprise business processes. A business process can be seen as a flow of tasks that are orchestrated to accomplish well-defined goals such as goods production or services delivery. From an IT perspective, BPM is closely related to a business process automation approach carried out by use of IT standards and technologies, such as service-oriented architectures (SOAs) and Web Services. This paper specifically focuses on fully automated business processes that are defined and executed as orchestrations of software services. In a BPM context, the ability to predict at design time the business process behavior assumes a strategic relevance, both to early assess whether or not the business goals are achieved and to gain a competitive advantage. A business process is typically specified by use of Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN), the standard language for the high-level description of business processes. Unfortunately, BPMN does not support the characterization of the business process in terms of nonfunctional or QoS properties, such as performance and reliability. To overcome such a limitation, this paper introduces Performability-enabled BPMN (PyBPMN), a lightweight BPMN extension for the specification of performance and reliability properties. PyBPMN enables the design time prediction of the business processes behavior, in terms of performance and reliability properties. Such prediction activity requires the use of models that are to be first built and then evaluated. In this respect, this work introduces a model-driven method that exploits PyBPMN to predict, at design time, the performance and the reliability of a business process, either to select the process configuration that provides the best behavior or to check if a given configuration satisfies the overall requirements. The proposed model-driven method that enacts the automated analysis of a business process behavior embraces the complete business process development cycle, from the specification phase down to the implementation phase. The paper also describes how the proposed model-driven method is implemented. The several model transformations at the core of the method have been implemented by use of QVT, and the standard language for specifying model transformations provided by OMG's MDA. The availability of such automated model transformations allows business analysts to predict the process behavior with no extra effort and without being required to own specific skills of performance or reliability theory, as shown by use of an example application.

A flexible approach for abstracting and personalizing large business process models

In process-aware information systems (PAISs), usually, different user groups have distinguished perspectives on the business processes supported and on related business data. Hence, personalized views and proper abstractions on these business processes are needed. However, existing PAISs do not provide adequate mechanisms for creating and visualizing process views and process model abstractions. Usually, process models are displayed to users in exactly the same way as originally modeled. This paper presents a flexible approach for creating personalized views based on parameterizable operations. Respective view creation operations can be flexibly composed to either hide non-relevant process information or to abstract it. Depending on the parameterization of the selected view creation operations, one obtains process views with more or less relaxed properties, e.g., regarding the degree of information loss or the soundness of the resulting model abstractions. Altogether, the realized view concept allows for a more flexible abstraction and visualization of large business process models satisfying the needs of different user groups.