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System design methodologies can greatly help the understanding of complex manufacturing situations. The IDEF0 structured analysis method is one of the favoured tools for industry.

International competition is driving manufacturing executives to place an ever‐growing importance on the formulation of computer integrated manufacturing (CIM) strategies as part of their corporate plans. Structured analysis and design techniques, in particular IDEF (Integrated Computer Aided Manufacturing definition method), are becoming a vital tool in the analysis and implementation of such CIM strategies. This article positively demonstrates the technique and its ability to model the link between design and manufacture in a CIM environment. The approach relates interdependencies of planning for manufacture, design and process planning within a CIM strategy. In particular it establishes the position of computer aided process planning (CAPP) in CIM architecture and evaluates a CAPP package as a potential element of a CIM strategy. The application to which IDEFo, in particular, has been used clearly demonstrates its usefulness to manufacturers as a powerful aid to the development of detailed CIM strategies.

Humanitarian supply chain (HSC) has been constantly challenged with multiple issues due to the complex dynamics of the disaster. These issues are inevitable and interrelated. The issues produce undesirable cascading effects that make performance measurement complicated. This paper aims to identify and model the critical barriers in the HSC.

The study identifies 17 barriers through the relevant literature and interviews with the stakeholders related to humanitarian organization (HO) in the developing economy. The barriers have been identified from strategic, technological, organizational, economic and operational point of view. Further, the barriers were ranked based on the degree of influence using the grey analytic network process (ANP) approach. The interrelationship among the influential barriers is established through modified total interpretive structural modelling (mTISM). To analyse and demonstrate the iterative consensus among the stakeholders, kappa statistics was adopted.

The barriers have been ranked to determine their extent of influence and modelled to reveal the interrelationship among them. The issues concerned with skills of personnel are the most influential barrier. Other three critical barriers identified are: chaotic operative environment, conflicting objectives of HO and lack of funding for information technology (IT) infrastructure. Appropriate funds need to be allocated towards IT infrastructure and personnel training.

Both quantitative and qualitative performance measurement frameworks had been proposed earlier for HSC. However, limited literature addresses the implementation issues with the available frameworks. This study advances the knowledge on performance measurement barriers of HSC and develops a functional description to identify the critical role of performance measurement in HOs. The study proposes a new version of the interpretive structure modelling, using mTISM technique, to determine the contextual interactions between various HSC performance measurement barriers.

Creation of new products from existing solutions (product re‐design) shortens new product introduction phases and reduces costs. The product re‐engineering process is a new approach to the realisation of substitute components without the benefit of original design process documentation or any other documentation relating to the component. Re‐engineering comprises stages which are potentially applicable to many industries. This research applies an enterprise modelling architecture to modelling the re‐engineering process, producing descriptions of the process from several different descriptive views, namely function, information, resource and organisation. This results in a more complete description of the process, in which the model itself may be used as a reference for the implementation of a re‐design process in a particular company. This research also shows how the information modelling constructs of CIMOSA can be used to meet the particular unique requirements of the process of re‐design.

Begins with a brief review of research in the area of performance, with particular emphasis on design and product development, highlighting the main weaknesses in work to date. Then presents a fundamental and generic model of performance, related to knowledge‐based activities in design, which describes performance in terms of its key elements, efficiency and effectiveness, and provides a basis for modelling performance across different process levels. Evolves this model further to describe performance measurement and management in design development. Concludes that it is not possible to distinguish the efficiency of the design activity from that of design management, and that, in addition, efficiency appears to be inherent to an activity, but is difficult to measure.

Businesses face increasing competition in local, international and global markets where responsiveness to changes within these markets is the key to success and survival. Consequently business strategies need to be consistently re‐defined to effectively reflect the different requirements of customers and to respond to changes in the business environment. The process of generating strategies is not always a simple decision‐making task and revised business and corporate strategies are often generated without considering the structure of the business, particularly at operational level. Furthermore, there is considerable vagueness in the literature and in practice about what constitutes strategy management. This paper reviews the diverse literature in strategy management and presents a business process model of the strategy generation process to ensure consistent generation and communication of strategy throughout an organisation. The performance of a business strategy can then be measured against a model of initial alignment and effective implementation.

This study aims to propose a tree‐based analytic tool that may be used in analyzing a large‐scale and complex service process. The tenet of this tool is based on the Boolean logic and named service tree analysis (STA). The proposed STA aims to reflect the customer participation perspective and to propose how to analyze the service process and deduce useful information.

Fault tree analysis is used as an underlying methodology since it has a Boolean logic to describe the customer's selection of each element and identifies critical events. Taking these advantages of the fault tree, the proposed STA consists of three main parts; service tree construction, qualitative analysis, and quantitative analysis. First, a service tree is constructed depending on how the service elements are selected by the customer; If the subordinate events are always selected by customers, they are linked with an AND gate, otherwise, with an OR gate. Next, in the qualitative analysis, service elements are characterized as core services, supporting services, and optional services by deducing a minimal service cut set. Last, qualitative analysis deals with deriving the impact of each service element based on the Kano model.

The suggested STA has advantages which help strategic operation and management of the service process.

This study is unique and even exploratory in that it first adopts the notion of tree analysis in structuring a large‐scale, complex service system. Further, the proposed service tree provides a systematic approach from customer participation perspective, which makes the service process to be managed efficiently.

Consistency in operations is necessary for an organization's survival and growth. It is difficult to achieve consistency because of the employees' different ways of performing the same task. Employees' education, experience and skill levels determine their own styles and differences in their styles cause variations in process output. If process master's (best performers in a process) ways of performing their own tasks can be well documented, then a company will be able to standardize its operating procedures in their best forms. And, when employees follow these procedures, variations will be minimized and best quality products or services will be offered to customers. However, documenting such procedures is far from easy. The purpose of this paper is to propose a step‐by‐step framework on how to create process documents for standardization purposes.

Qualitative research was adopted for this study. Published works in the process improvement, knowledge management (KM), and project management literatures were used to build the proposed framework.

The roles of KM, semantics, and metadata schema were found very significant in creating process documents for standardization purposes.

Serves as a guide to practitioners who desire to standardize their operations.

A review of academic and business sources indicated that work on process standardization is conspicuously absent. This paper makes a contribution to fill this gap.

Examines the problems, and the limitations, of the use of process mapping techniques in the light of sociotechnical experience in systems analysis. To do this, first, the fundamental characteristics of the various process mapping techniques are illustrated, highlighting how these can be characterised by a conception of business processes based on the notion of “technology” which has been developed within modernist organisation theory. Then, the contribution of sociotechnical theory to office work analysis and design is presented, with particular reference to the work of Calvin Pava on the relationship between the method of analysis and the nature of work. Concludes with some reflections on the residual role attributed to social aspects within process mapping and on the problem of artificial rationality and linearity linked to an acritical use of modelling languages.

Managing processes with the aim of improving them necessarily requires both analysis and critical evaluation of organizational practice. This article takes up the theme of business process analysis with the aim of highlighting and comparing alternative techniques and approaches. Four approaches have been identified: action analysis, process mapping, co‐ordination analysis and social grammar analysis. An interpretative model of the fundamental differences between these approaches is proposed. This paper discusses both the limits and the possibilities offered by each approach and concludes with a reflection on the problem of integrating diverse analytical perspectives.