According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

House of Quality

Under the umbrella of buzzwords such as “Business Activity Monitoring” (BAM) and “Business Process Intelligence” (BPI) both academic (e.g., EMiT, Little Thumb, InWoLvE, Process Miner, and MinSoN) and commercial tools (e.g., ARIS PPM, HP BPI, and ILOG JViews) have been developed. The goal of these tools is to extract knowledge from event logs (e.g., transaction logs in an ERP system or audit trails in a WFM system), i.e., to do process mining. Unfortunately, tools use different formats for reading/storing log files and present their results in different ways. This makes it difficult to use different tools on the same data set and to compare the mining results. Furthermore, some of these tools implement concepts that can be very useful in the other tools but it is often difficult to combine tools. As a result, researchers working on new process mining techniques are forced to build a mining infrastructure from scratch or test their techniques in an isolated way, disconnected from any practical applications. To overcome these kind of problems, we have developed the ProM framework, i.e., an “pluggable” environment for process mining. The framework is flexible with respect to the input and output format, and is also open enough to allow for the easy reuse of code during the implementation of new process mining ideas. This paper introduces the ProM framework and gives an overview of the plug-ins that have been developed.

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The prom framework: a new era in process mining tool support

Purpose – In the last two decades, a proliferation of business process management (BPM) modeling languages, standards and software systems has given rise to much confusion and obstacles to adoption. Since new BPM languages and notation terminologies were not well defined, duplicate features are common. This paper seeks to make sense of the myriad BPM standards, organising them in a classification framework, and to identify key industry trends.Design/methodology/approach – An extensive literature review is conducted and relevant BPM notations, languages and standards are referenced against the proposed BPM Standards Classification Framework, which lists each standard's distinct features, strengths and weaknesses.Findings – The paper is unaware of any classification of BPM languages. An attempt is made to classify BPM languages, standards and notations into four main groups: execution, interchange, graphical, and diagnosis standards. At the present time, there is a lack of established diagnosis standards. I...

Business process management (BPM) standards: a survey

Supply chain finance: A systematic literature review and bibliometric analysis

In an era of globalization, it is almost impossible for a company to stay competitive with its supply chain locating in a single country ( A. Sabbaghi & N. Sabbaghi, 2004 , Global supply-chain strategy and global competitiveness. International Business & Economics Research Journal, 3 (7), 63–76). On the other hand, increasing global sourcing and selling brings substantial challenges on the material flow, information flow, and financial flow along lengthened supply chains. Many researches in the past decades have illustrated the benefits of supply chain visibility by streamlining information flow ( Eppen, 1979 , Effects of centralization on expected costs in a multilocation newsboy problem. Management Science, 25 (5), 498–501; Lee & Whang, 2000 , Information sharing in a supply chain. International Journal of Manufacturing Technology and Management, 1 (1), 79–93; Vickery, Jayaram, Droge, & Calantone, 2003 , The effects of an integrative supply chain strategy on customer service and financial performance: An analysis of direct versus indirect relationships. Journal of Operations Management, 21 (5), 523–539; Zhang & Zipkin, 1990 , A queueing model to analyze the value of centralized inventory information. Operations Research, 38 (2), 296–307). It is well known that an informational centralized supply chain outperforms its decentralized counterpart through reducing bullwhip effect (Chen, Drezner, Ryan, & Simchi-Levi, 2000, Qualifying the bullwhip effect in a simple supply chain: The impact of forecasting, lead times, and information. Management Science, 46 (3), 436–443; Lee, Padmanabhan, & Whang, 1997 , Information distortion in a supply chain: The bullwhip effect. Management Science, 34 (4), 546–558).

Supply Chain Finance: Concept and Modeling

To effectively manage a supply chain, we should no longer focus on physical flow and informational flow only, but also the financial flow. The financial supply chain management (FSCM) extracts capital tied to the raw material, work-in-process, inventory in transit, and accounts receivable (accounts payable). In this paper we review a set of supply chain financing solutions tailored by the financial institutions, and introduce a few quantitative works from the operations research society. The survey reveals the benefits of actively managing the financial supply chain and highlights the quantitative decision-making process in FSCM. Moreover, we propose several interesting problems in FSCM which are remained to be explored.

Financial supply chain management

Business process modeling is the basis of business process management. The target of business process modeling is to get an abstract representation of the actual business processes. Although there are many business modeling methods, no well established modeling standard is available in this area. This paper reviews major business process modeling methods. Important aspects of these methods are discussed, including meta-model, graphical notation, serial representation, and tool support.

A Comparison of Business Process Modeling Methods

Identified as a strategic area, supply chain transformation plays a critical role in today's IBM business. In this paper, we introduce an effort in IBM Research Division named SmartSCOR, which provides a comprehensive framework and methodology for On-Demand SCM problem-solving based on the cross-industry process standard Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model and a variety of simulation/optimization techniques. SmartSCOR sees transformation in two different levels, from supply chain strategy design/redesign to supply chain process improvement. Supply chain strategy design/redesign transforms a supply chain in a fundamental manner by means of manufacturing and distribution network reconfiguration, value chain integration, etc. Supply chain process improvement helps align the underlying business processes to strategy setting and get them streamlined. The two levels interact with each other and result in a profound while smooth transformation. SmartSCOR has been successfully applied in two supply chain transformation projects for validation and hardening.

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IBM SmartSCOR - a SCOR based supply chain transformation platform through simulation and optimization techniques

Process mining aims at distilling useful knowledge from the execution logs of process models. It has become a vivid research area in recent years. In this paper, a novel approach for process mining based on two event types, i.e., START and COMPLETE, is proposed. Information about the start and completion of tasks can be used to explicitly detect parallelism. The algorithm presented in this paper overcomes some of the limitations of existing algorithms such as the a-algorithm (e.g., short-loops) and therefore enhances the applicability of process mining in practical situations. Based on the completeness of the given event log and the behavior theory of Petri nets, the correctness of the algorithm can be proved theoretically.

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Changrui Ren

Papers

Supply Chain Finance: Concept and Modeling

Financial supply chain management

A Comparison of Business Process Modeling Methods

IBM SmartSCOR - a SCOR based supply chain transformation platform through simulation and optimization techniques

A Novel Approach for Process Mining Based on Event Types