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The design and execution of business processes are important drivers of organizational performance. Organizations design their operations around cross-functional processes adopting business process management (BPM) methods, tools and systems. This often involves assigning BPM accountability to senior executives such as the chief operating officer (COO), chief information officer (CIO), or chief technology officer (CTO). Some organizations appoint a chief process officer (CPO), a phenomenon raising important questions about the skills and responsibilities of this position within the top management team. The purpose of this paper is to conduct an empirical study to explore the skills and responsibilities of CPOs and differences to other executives.

The authors conducted an exploratory content analysis of job resumes from LinkedIn.com to investigate the skills and careers of individuals appointed as COO, CIO, CTO and CPO in organizations from different industries and sizes. The content analysis was complemented with expert interviews of CPOs to obtain rich insights into their perception of the responsibilities of this position.

CPOs possess a unique skill set to serve as change agents. Their skills enable them to serve as integrators and influencers across managerial ranks and corporate functions. COOs, CIOs and CTOs possess more specialized skills related to their corporate function, whereas CPOs are more generalists who facilitate process-oriented strategy and execution, driving cultural change throughout the organization. These findings are consistent across industry and size.

This is the first paper to examine the CPO position in relation to other senior executive positions. Hence, it addresses an important gap in the BPM literature which can help organizations to make informed decisions whether they need a CPO position or have it become a part-time role of one of their existing C-level positions.

Customer centricity has evolved into a success factor for many companies, requiring all corporate activities – including business processes – to be aligned with customer needs. With most existing approaches to business process (re-)design focusing on process efficiency, customers are often treated as second-class citizens. Despite emergent research on customer process management, there is a lack of guidance on how to design customer-centric business processes.

The authors conducted a structured literature review and analyzed companies awarded for outstanding customer centricity to compile design heuristics for customer-centric business processes. The authors iteratively validated and refined these heuristics with experts from academia and industry. Finally, the heuristics was grouped according to their expected impact on interaction capabilities to enable their prioritization in specific settings.

The authors proposed 15 expert-approved and literature-backed design heuristics for customer-centric business processes together with real-world examples. The heuristics aim at increasing customer satisfaction with interaction-intensive core processes, which is an important driver of corporate success.

The design heuristics complement existing efficiency-centered (re-)design heuristics. They reflect cognitive shortcuts that support process analysts in the generation of innovative ideas during process (re-)design. The heuristics also add to customer process management and help put customer centricity into practice.

Accurate segmentation of artificial assembly action is the basis of autonomous industrial assembly robots. This paper aims to study the precise segmentation method of manual assembly action.

In this paper, a temporal-spatial-contact features segmentation system (TSCFSS) for manual assembly actions recognition and segmentation is proposed. The system consists of three stages: spatial features extraction, contact force features extraction and action segmentation in the temporal dimension. In the spatial features extraction stage, a vectors assembly graph (VAG) is proposed to precisely describe the motion state of the objects and relative position between objects in an RGB-D video frame. Then graph networks are used to extract the spatial features from the VAG. In the contact features extraction stage, a sliding window is used to cut contact force features between hands and tools/parts corresponding to the video frame. Finally, in the action segmentation stage, the spatial and contact features are concatenated as the input of temporal convolution networks for action recognition and segmentation. The experiments have been conducted on a new manual assembly data set containing RGB-D video and contact force.

In the experiments, the TSCFSS is used to recognize 11 kinds of assembly actions in demonstrations and outperforms the other comparative action identification methods.

A novel manual assembly actions precisely segmentation system, which fuses temporal features, spatial features and contact force features, has been proposed. The VAG, a symbolic knowledge representation for describing assembly scene state, is proposed, making action segmentation more convenient. A data set with RGB-D video and contact force is specifically tailored for researching manual assembly actions.

The purpose of this paper is to overview the state of research on feedback and aspects of feedback that have been under-researched in the scholarly literature, particularly involving the theme of quality of the feedback. The paper seeks to draw on the existing literature, to develop a conceptual framework that identifies important aspects associated with quality of feedback that the articles in this special issue uniquely address.

This is a conceptual article that presents the results of an analysis of the feedback research literature and offers an abbreviated overview of it. It also develops a conceptual model that illustrates the complexity of the feedback process and identifies gaps that exist in the literature which the contributions of this special issue address.

The provision of feedback is critical to individuals ' learning and performance improvement in the context of their work. Coupled with the provision of feedback is the importance and need for high quality feedback. The quality of feedback and factors that influence it are the central themes of this issue.

This paper introduces this special issue on “Perceptions of quality of feedback in organizations: characteristics, determinants, outcomes of feedback, and possibilities for improvement” by overviewing the concepts associated with feedback and feedback seeking and developing a conceptual model that highlights the complexity of the feedback process. It also identifies existing gaps in the knowledge base that the contributions within this special issue address.