Business Process Management Systems

This article presents a reflection on the role of Business Process Management and associated technologies on supporting/evolving current Accounting Information Systems. Although traditional Accounting Information Systems fulfill the need of financial reporting, collecting data from central databases and consolidating it, so that the information can be easily consumed by decision-makers, they were not created bearing in mind the idea of performing business process oriented accounting. Organizations have always worked in a business process oriented way either implicit or explicit. Business Process Management adoption as a management practice has been gaining popularity in recent years, making sense an evolution of Accounting Information Systems towards a business process oriented accounting supported on a Business Process Management Suite. The benefits of this evolution include, among others, the flexibility and agility in business process redefinition, the empowerment of knowledge workers, the implementation of control points for data collection to produce real-time reports and alerts relating the use of financial and non-financial information, so that decision-makers can act on.

This research Project was interested in the factors that have influence BPMS implementation and aimed at offering managerial guidance on avoiding pitfalls when implementing any business Process management System. Despite the advantages and challenges of tourism in Kenya, not much academic research has examined BPMS. Although a BPMS has numerous advantages, not all cases of implementation are successful, as with the case of other IT projects which record over 70% failure rate . A questionnaire was designed to investigate this topic and the significant factors were concluded in the end. A Sample of 104 tour operators that were registered under the main tourism marketing body in Kenya (KATO) was randomly selected. According to the study findings, only 10% of the tour operators had implemented systems that met the planned schedules, goals and objectives. The analyses concluded that 67% of the implemented systems either failed to meet their objectives or were completely abandoned while 22% partially succeeded. The most widely cited factor influencing the implementation of BPMS was found to be People factors. Other factors discovered and discussed were the role of top management support, the role of a strategic implementation plan and finally information technology infrastructure factors, ranked in that order. Therefore, the recommendations for effective implementation of BPMS focused on a consideration of the cited factors especially the staff skills and training, change management and the top management team attributes. Lastly, the research recommends business stakeholders who may be eager to replace their old systems to consider all the factors cited in this research. Consequently, the researcher recommends that future research should place emphasis on the implementation process from a holistic perspective and also from other stakeholders' perspectives.

This article presents a reflection on the role of Business Process Management and associated technologies on supporting/evolving current Accounting Information Systems. Although traditional Accounting Information Systems fulfill the need of financial reporting, collecting data from central databases and consolidating it, so that the information can be easily consumed by decisionmakers, they were not created bearing in mind the idea of performing business process oriented accounting. Organizations have always worked in a business process oriented way either implicit or explicit. Business Process Management adoption as a management practice has been gaining popularity in recent years, making sense an evolution of Accounting Information Systems towards a business process oriented accounting supported on a Business Process Management Suite. The benefits of this evolution include, among others, the flexibility and agility in business process redefinition, the empowerment of knowledge workers, the implementation of control points for data collection to produce real-time reports and alerts relating the use of financial and nonfinancial information, so that decision-makers can act on.

This paper proposes a novel method for the structuring of the knowledge of a service process in order to be processed by lightweight declarative computing infrastructures. Through the identification of self-similarities in the process, the flow of the structured information and the sequence of activities performed in the process are easily implemented by means of cyber-physical systems technologies, in order to timely meet the customer/stakeholder’s requirements. The study was performed in a telecommunication service providing organization. Service teams create a collaborative network. With the use of the CPS proposed in this work they can communicate problems and disseminate solutions. This methodology uses the information of a set of performance indicators of the service organization to achieve a better control of the effectiveness and the bottlenecks in the supply network. The methodology is borrowed from the mechatronics field and it is prone to a natural extension and reuse for the similar information structures in manufacturing processes.

While researching integration aspects of cloud Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) with on-premises applications, authors have identified various scenarios that cannot be effectively addressed using existing integration solutions and patterns. Mobile Agents (MAs) were proposed as the technology addressing these integration challenges [1]. During the research, existing MA platforms were analyzed what led to conclusion that none of them is fully addressing specific requirements of end-users in BPM scenarios. As a result, a new approach for designing and executing mobile agents was proposed. This approach is based on workflows and enables end-users having no programming skills to design MAs what is critical in BPM scenarios [2]. In addition existing researches cover different scenarios of how intelligent agents can be used in BPM space, however these do not address specific aspects of MA integration with cloud BPMS, what is critical for proposed solution. During analysis of this subject, authors have identified required integration components, and are proposing an algorithm that allows to determine how these components should be implemented based on technical specification of cloud BPMS. AgentWF prototype provides a sample implementation of all components, and demonstrates how MA system should be integrated with cloud BPMS using proposed approach. Proposed approach is extendable and may be reused for integrating MAs with cloud systems in other domains as well.

This paper proposes a novel method for the structuring of the knowledge of a service process in order to be processed by lightweight declarative computing infrastructures. Through the identification of selfsimilarities in the process, the flow of the structured information and the sequence of activities performed in the process are easily implemented by means of cyber-physical systems technologies, in order to timely meet the customer/stakeholder's requirements. The study was performed in a telecommunication service providing organization. Service teams create a collaborative network. With the use of the CPS proposed in this work they can communicate problems and disseminate solutions. This methodology uses the information of a set of performance indicators of the service organization to achieve a better control of the effectiveness and the bottlenecks in the supply network. The methodology is borrowed from the mechatronics field and it is prone to a natural extension and reuse for the similar information structures in manufacturing processes.