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Erschienen in:
2021 | OriginalPaper | Buchkapitel
Managing Agile Business Processes at N-DECT
Development of a Process-Aware Information System for Agile Business Processes
verfasst von : Jens Geiger, Stefan Jablonski, Sebastian Petter, Louis Püschel, Maximilian Röglinger
Erschienen in: Business Process Management Cases Vol. 2
Verlag: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
Abstract
(a)
Situation faced: Many companies must handle unplanned events like delayed shipments, changing customer requests, and machine breakdowns. N-DECT, a medium-sized company that offers customer-specific solutions for material testing and processes many customer orders simultaneously, is no exception. The challenge of such agile business processes is that their dynamic re-planning and reprioritization is cumbersome and prone to error. Hence, an automated solution based on a process-aware information system (PAIS) is sorely needed.
(b)
Actions taken: Against this backdrop, the University of Bayreuth and four medium-sized companies, including N-DECT, engaged in a joint research project with the objective of developing and evaluating a PAIS architecture that enables the prioritization, execution, and monitoring of agile processes based on company-specific key figures (e.g., order-specific, profit-specific, or product-specific delivery dates). To that end, we collected requirements, designed the PAIS architecture—both a generic version and company-specific versions—built prototypes, and evaluated these prototypes at all four companies.
(c)
Results achieved: The key outcome of the research project was the development of a generic three-layer PAIS architecture with an innovative component for the prioritization of agile processes. This component builds on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), which supports the prioritization of process instances (i.e., tasks). The real-world evaluation at N-DECT showed that the agile PAIS reduces cumbersome manual resource assignments and prioritization tasks, which can be non-systematic and prone to error because of subjective influences.
(d)
Lessons learned: We learned that agile business processes can be effectively enacted and monitored through PAIS based on process models, combined with the AHP and key figures. We also learned that there are two kinds of agility—one at the task level and one at the instance level—which require different kinds of handling through PAIS.