Managing Agile Business Processes at N-DECT : Development of a Process-Aware Information System for Agile Business Processes

Titelangaben

Geiger, Jens ; Jablonski, Stefan ; Petter, Sebastian ; Püschel, Louis ; Röglinger, Maximilian:
Managing Agile Business Processes at N-DECT : Development of a Process-Aware Information System for Agile Business Processes.
In: vom Brocke, Jan ; Mendling, Jan ; Rosemann, Michael (Hrsg.): Business Process Management Cases. Band 2. Digital Transformation - Strategy, Processes and Execution. - Berlin : Springer , 2021 . - S. 93-108
ISBN 978-3-662-63046-4
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-63047-1_8

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Abstract

Situation faced: Many companies must handle unplanned events owing to delayed shipments, changing customer requests, and accidental ma-chine breakdowns. This also holds for N-DECT, a medium-sized company that offers customer-specific solutions for material testing as well as pro-cesses many customer orders simultaneously. The challenge of such agile business processes is that their dynamic re-planning and reprioritization is cumbersome and error-prone. Hence, an automated solution based on a process-aware information system (PAIS) is in high need.
Actions taken: Against this backdrop, the University of Bayreuth and four medium-sized companies – one of which was N-DECT – engaged in a joint research project with the objective of developing and evaluating a PAIS architecture that enables the prioritization, execution, and monitor-ing of agile processes based on company-specific key figures (e.g. order-specific profit or product-specific delivery date). To that end, we iteratively collected requirements, designed the PAIS architecture – a generic version and company-specific versions, built prototypes, and evaluated these pro-totypes onsite at all companies involved, including N-DECT.
Results achieved: The key outcome of the research project was a generic three-layer PAIS architecture with an innovative and newly developed component for the prioritization of agile processes. This component builds on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) that support the prioritization of process instances (i.e. tasks). The real-world evaluation at N-DECT showed that the agile PAIS reduces cumbersome manual resource assign-ment and prioritization task, which can be error-prone and non-systematic because of subjective influences.
Lessons learned: We found that agile business processes can be effective-ly enacted and monitored through PAIS based on process models com-bined with the AHP and key figures. We also found that there are different kinds of agility, i.e. at the task and the instance level, which require a dif-ferent handling through PAIS.