Browsing by Author "Mejri, Asma"
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- Enhancing business process flexibility in an emergency care processPublication . Mejri, Asma; Ghannouchi, Sonia Ayachi; Martinho, Ricardo; Elhadj, FetehBusiness Process Management (BPM) is being increasingly adopted to streamline healthcare service delivery and management processes. Emergency departments (ED) are very complex. To operate effectively and create value, EDs must be flexible and have the ability to rapidly adapt to the highly variable needs of patients. In this paper, we provide models for a real-world scenario emergency care (EC) process, and elicit its flexibility needs using interviews with the EC process participants. We then use a guidance tool to help with the choice of the most suitable Business Process Management System (BPMS), regarding the flexibility needs elicited. We validate this choice by modelling the new flexibility enhanced EC process with one of the advised BPMSs, and analyse its support regarding the elicited flexibility needs.
- A quantitative approach for measuring the degree of flexibility of business process modelsPublication . Mejri, Asma; Ayachi-Ghannouchi, Sonia; Martinho, RicardoPurpose The purpose of this paper is to measure the flexibility of business process models. The authors give the notions of flexible process distance, which corresponds to the number of change operations needed for transforming one process model into another, considering the different perspectives (functional, operational, behavioral, informational, and organizational). Design/methodology/approach The proposed approach is a quantitative-based approach to measure the flexibility of business process models. In this context, the authors presented a method to compute the distance between two process models. The authors measured the distance between a process model and a process variant in terms of the number of high-level change operations (e.g. to insert or delete actors) needed to transform the process model into the respective variant when a change occurred, considering the different perspectives and the flexible features. Findings To evaluate the flexibility-measurement approach, the authors performed a comprehensive simulation using an emergency care (EC) business process model and its variants. The authors used a real-world EC process and illustrated the possible changes faced in the emergency department (possible variants). Simulation results were promising because they fit the flexibility needs of the EC process users. This was validated using the authors’ previous work which consists in a guidance approach for business process flexibility. Research limitations/implications The authors defined six different distances between business process models, which are summarized in the definition of total process distance. However, changes in one perspective may lead to changes in other perspectives. For instance, adding a new activity may lead to adding a new actor. Practical implications The results of this study would help companies to obtain important information about their processes and to compare the desired level of flexibility with their actual process flexibility. Originality/value This study is probably the first flexibility-measurement approach which incorporates features for capturing changes affecting the functional, operational, informational, organizational, and behavioral perspectives as well as elements related to approaches enhancing flexibility.
- Representing Business Process Flexibility using Concept MapsPublication . Mejri, Asma; Ghannouchi, Sonia Ayachi; Martinho, RicardoBusiness process flexibility has been a relevant research topic within Business Process Management (BPM) for the past 20 years. Several taxonomies were proposed along this time, emphasizing certain aspects of flexibility or change within business processes, taking into account the various dimensions of business processes. Although these taxonomies have been most useful in contributing to research advances on flexibility, they contain distinct concept names for the same meaning and vice-versa. Additionally, they are often textual and heavily descriptive, and do not provide a simplified representation of their concepts and relationships. In this paper we propose the use of the Concept Maps (CMaps) approach to achieve this simplified representation of business process flexibility. The main output is concept maps covering the wide and diverse spectrum of business process flexibility concepts and relationships. In this way, researchers can benefit from a simpler and yet understandable representation, which also takes into account the most established business process flexibility definitions found in prominent research literature.