A main task of Business Process Management is to identify weaknesses in business processes that may result in monetary or quality-related drawbacks in order to eliminate them subsequently. A common way to identify weaknesses is to analyze process models. While this has traditionally been done manually, recent work proposes using automatic model query approaches promising time and money savings....

The motivation behind the idea of product focused process improvement is to make a process improvement program address certain product quality features in an explicit manner. The PROFES methodology [PROFES (2001)] describes such an improvement program through the notion of a PPD (Product-Process Dependency) repository. The typed generic process model (TGPM) [Satpathy (2000)] is a parametric tem...

During the last few years there has been considerable interest in software process assessment and improvement methods based on the Software Engineering Institute's(SEIs) pioneering work in this area. The emergence of a number of variations of the SEI's method suggests the need to standardise on an internationally approved method of software process assessment and improvement based on good manag...

Software process improvement aims at improving the development process of software systems. It is initiated by process assessment identifying strengths and weaknesses and based on the findings, improvement plans are developed. In general, a process reference model (e.g., CMMI) is used throughout the process of software process improvement as the base. CMMI defines a set of process areas involve...

Measurement based software process improvement is nowadays a mandatory activity. This implies continuous process monitoring in order to predict its behavior, highlight its performance variations and, if necessary, quickly react to them. Process variations are due to common causes or assignable ones. The former are part of the process itself while the latter are due to exceptional events that re...

In the face of an oversupplied world pig market only the most efficient producers will stay in business. By and large these will be the operations that are able to more successfully exploit the genetic potential of their animals. Similarly, only those breeders who are able to demonstrate sustained genetic improvement will sell stock to the smaller number of large producers who are left. Althoug...

Alkaline hydrolysis of ethyl acetate is essentially an irreversible and second order reaction. Industrial importance of the reaction product, sodium acetate, necessitate for process improvement in terms of maximum conversion and economical usage of raw materials. Statistical design of experiments was utilized to enhance conversion in both batch and plug flow reactors.A full two level factor...

Process improvement is the most value-adding activity in the BPM lifecycle. Despite the mature body of knowledge related to process improvement, there is a lack of prescriptive knowledge that takes a single-process/multi-project perspective, covers a broad range of improvement opportunities, and accounts for the characteristics of the process in focus. Against this background, we propose a deci...