Florian Krenn

Subject-oriented Design of Smart Hyper-connected Logistics Systems

Digitization increasingly pervades our everyday life. Recent trends like the Internet of Things, Cyber-Physical Systems, Industry 4.0 or the Physical Internet aim to apply Information and Communication Technology in order to improve organizational performance and ensure competitive advantage. These attempts aim to further integrate the physical and digital world in order to enable communication and collaboration among different organizational actors (people, machines, and even things) and among diverse organizations in real-time. In the logistics domain the increasing digitization is reflected in the Physical Internet initiative. This paper investigates which role S-BPM could play in the Physical Internet. Thereby, previous S-BPM research in the context of Industry 4.0 is discussed with respect to its applicability for designing and implementing aspects of the Physical Internet. Furthermore, an extended S-BPM modeling approach is presented and applied in an application example for smart parcel distribution. Finally, an implementation strategy targeting S-BPM implementations in the Physical Internet is sketched.

Subject-orientation as design language for integration across organisational control layers

Recent research and development in production industry reveals a movement to cyber-physical production systems and Internet of things enabled manufacturing. In this context, ways in which enterprise processes are conceptualised and executed are changing. Decentralising production by applying interlinked cyber-physical production resources breaks up the traditional boundaries between different process abstraction layers. Heterogeneous smart devices and processes at all levels in the industrial control need to interact in such systems. In this paper, requirements from the field of Business Process Management towards the vertical integration of business and production processes are derived. With respect to the identified requirements the eligibility of the Subject-oriented Process Management (S-BPM) approach for vertical process integration is depicted. At the core, the paper investigates the applicability of S-BPM to achieve vertical process integration and reports lessons learnt from two industrial application scenarios. The first scenario aims to encode human properties to adapt workplaces to human needs. The second scenario aims towards supporting the execution and tracking of dynamic production processes.

Towards Stakeholder-Centered Design of Open Systems: Learning from Organizational Learning

Todays business requires stakeholders to get involved in organizing work and developing organizational processes, ranging from product life cycle management to cross-boundary networking of organizations. In that context stakeholders continuously and iteratively need to address their business and knowledge processing environment at the same time. When the business processing environment is concerned, the adaption of work procedures in-use takes center stage. Going beyond operation affects learning, and thus the knowledge processing environment. Hereby, proposals to (fundamentally) change existing work processes are handled. Each input needs to be formulated as knowledge claim, before being investigated for taking decisions on modifying currently implemented processes. The design of corresponding support technologies requires highly flexible, since context-aware architectures. We introduce a corresponding component framework for design support. It features organizational development based on articulating and processing work-relevant knowledge for changing affected business processes. As the framework is open to different implementations versatile interactive solutions can be generated in dynamically evolving settings.

Subject-oriented process design across organizational control layers

The globalization of process industries has not only triggered technological integration processes, such as the Internet of Things, but also organizational alignment processes. While horizontal coupling of processes has been achieved through Business Process Management and Integrated Manufacturing Systems, vertical management and operation across organization layers still lack unifying approaches. In particular the vertical integration of business processes with production planning systems and production control systems is of crucial importance for agile business development. Moreover, process designs on the management and operational level increasingly need to be accomplished by the stakeholders themselves. Tackling these critical issues requires a human-centered and universal approach, as provided by subject-oriented modeling and execution. We demonstrate the horizontal and vertical integration of processes revealing fundamental capabilities and development potential of communication-based designs.

Exploring the Potential of Dynamic Perspective Taking on Business Processes

Although many organizations have started to work with business process models in their operational practice, they have not explored the entire potential of intertwining business process modeling with organizational development. Process specifications contain workflows that require execution, in order to achieve business objectives and support business operation effectively. With the advent of Subject-oriented and Social Business Process Management, communication and stakeholder interaction have become novel perspectives on how to design and implement processes. They go beyond formal responsibilities encoded in functional roles, and are not very common across organizational hierarchies. However, stakeholders, including organizational developers and IT specialists, can be supported looking at processes and their execution from either perspective, namely, from a traditional one, focusing on functions and task accomplishment, and from an interactional perspective, focusing on communication among stakeholders and system interactions. The introduced dual-mode workflow execution engine UeberFlow allows considering both perspectives during process runtime, thus, checking operational completeness from either perspective. Stakeholders can start modeling with a perspective they are familiar with and subsequently proceed with the another one by switching dynamically to an alternate mode of execution. The presented meta-model and architecture of such a dual mode support tool enables coupling business process management directly with organizational development.

Subject-Oriented Employee Involvement and Empowerment in Organizational Innovation

Within todays complex and dynamic environment, organizations need to constantly adapt and innovate. Although employees pose a valuable source for improvement ideas, they are often neglected in innovation processes. Empowering employees to take part in innovation and improvement processes requires organizational structures facilitating employee involvement and adequate tools supporting employee commitment. This paper proposes the enrichment of the subject-oriented approach to provide adequate tool support facilitating employee involvement and empowerment. It describes an enabling space that is illustrated in an industrial case study.

Dealing with Process Complexity: A Multiperspective Approach

In this paper an approach contributing to handling the increasing complexity of (business) process model is presented. In addition to existing approaches focusing on reducing the internal cognitive load (e.g., process model modularization and decomposition) this paper focuses on a visualization based approach targeting to reduce the external cognitive load. This idea builds on the combination of multiple perspectives to visualize a process model and possible resulting synergy effects supporting the understanding of process models despite their complexity. In a first empirical study the support potential of this multiperspective process model visualization analyzed and the results are presented herein.

The Semantic Exchange Standard for Subject-Oriented Process Models

After the first general concept about using ontologies for the exchange of subject-oriented business process models in 2014, a concrete proposal for using the Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the semantic web technology framework as a concrete and direct means was made in 2017 including a proof of concept and proposal for a first standard. Based upon this work a standardization committee has formed and further developed the concept, brought in or reduced definitions, and discussed and agreed on specific controversial topics. In this paper we describe the progress made in 2017 and the current state of the OWL-Standard for the Subject-Oriented Parallel Activity Specification Schema (PASS) modeling language. We present the current state and argue for the made conventions.

Stakeholder-centered Process Implementation: Assessing S-BPM Tool Support

Since Subject-oriented Business Process Management (S-BPM) models can be executed after validation without further transformation, toolshave been developed to support model execution. Asthese tools target not only non-disruptive execution of process models but also intuitive ease of use, stakeholders could expect effective and efficient implementation support of business processes. In the presented study we have challenged 3 stakeholder-centered tools refining, validating, and executing a complex process model. We wanted to knowhow much effort needs to be spent when a prototypical applicationis generated from a process specificationprovided by theinvolved stakeholders. The tools were a commercially available suite, a tool currently approaching the market, and a research tool. Our assessmentstudy reveals substantial effortthat needs to be spent for refining and validating process models, before being able to generate an interactive process experience. Hence, (S-)BPM tool developers are encouraged tosupport stakeholders according to the identified needs.

Human-Controlled Production

In factories of the future, the worker and his or her well-being is regarded a crucial part of manufacturing situations. Human factors are recognized as vital to achieve sustainable organizational success. Advances in the area of wearable sensors proclaim that sensing human properties within manufacturing settings is technically feasible. Thereby, sensing human properties, such as the level of comfort or stress, may be used to adapt system behaviour in manufacturing situations. This chapter revisits related work from adaptive systems design addressing triggers for adaptations and impacted dimensions. The related work can be considered as design space for developers of S-BPM-based adaptive processes. In line with the related work, a laboratory setting at the Johannes Kepler University Linz has been designed and utilized for testing sensor-based process behaviour and control. Essential findings are described with respect to system architectures and S-BPM process design. The chapter concludes with relating modelling adaptive to human-aware S-BPM processes on a concept layer, and future work.