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Gestructureerd meten is weten:het kwantificeren van de prestatieverbetering door WFM technologie
No full textProcess improvement : the creation and evaluation of process alternatives
Get PDFCompanies continuously strive to improve their processes to increase productivity and delivered quality against lower costs. With Business Process Redesign (BPR) projects such improvement goals can be achieved. BPR involves the restructuring of business processes, stimulated by the application of information technology. Although BPR is widely applied in industry, a systematic approach that helps a team in deriving designs for better performing business processes is lacking. The approach for Process Improvement by Creating and Evaluating process alternatives (in short: the PrICE approach) is developed to describe and support the concrete steps that will lead a design team from the as-is process to the to-be process. The starting point for the PrICE approach is a model of an existing process. The as-is model contains tasks and their execution ordering, data elements that are created and used, resources and their allocation and performance information. First, redesign opportunities are identified in the process model. A redesign opportunity leads to a combination of a certain redesign operation and a process part on which this operation can be applied. The PrICE approach consists of four steps. The first step of the PrICE approach describes the selection of redesign operations. Eight redesign operations have been developed, each supporting a particular type of redesign creation. We introduce two possible means to select applicable operations: process measures and process mining. Process measures provide a global view on the characteristics of the process and their values may reveal weaknesses in the process. The idea of process mining is to discover, monitor and improve business processes by extracting knowledge from event logs. Process mining results point out what type of changes may be beneficial. Moreover, bottlenecks, i.e., parts of the process that need improvement, are detected. The second step of the approach is the selection of process parts. In this step we focus on the selection of a process part in such a way that the application of a redesign operation results in a correct process model. The third step of the approach concentrates on the creation of process alternatives. An application of a redesign operation to a selected process part results in an alternative process model. An overview of the created alternatives is provided with the process alternatives tree. The root node of the tree is the original model and the other nodes represent the created alternatives. Each of the nodes may serve as a starting point for the creation of another alternative. In the last step of the approach, the performance of the process alternatives is evaluated with simulation. Simulation provides quantitative estimates for the performance, e.g., on time or costs, of a process model. By comparing the simulation results of the models in an alternatives tree, a quantitatively supported choice for the best alternative model, the to-be process, can be made. The PrICE approach is supported with the PrICE tool kit. The tool support is implemented as part of the Process Mining (ProM) framework. The tool kit supports the application of the various steps of the approach. The first two steps are supported with the process mining techniques that are available in ProM. The main features of the PrICE tool kit are the user guidance in the selection of process parts, the creation of process alternatives, the construction of the process alternatives tree and the evaluation of the alternatives with simulation. After the selection of a redesign operation, a process part for redesign is selected by the user by clicking on the tasks in the process model. Colors are used to guide the user and show which tasks may be added to the current selection to form a process part. This way, it is ensured that the input for the creation of a process alternative is such that a correct alternative model can be created. After the creation of an alternative model, the process alternatives tree is updated with a new node representing this alternative. Each node in the alternatives tree can be selected as starting point for the creation of another process alternative. With regard to the evaluation of the alternatives, one can select a subset of nodes for simulation or simulate the complete tree. A simulation study is performed in batch, i.e., all selected models are simulated without user interaction. Afterwards, the simulation results are displayed on the tree nodes. In addition, colors are used to guide the user in finding the best performing alternatives. The developed tool support demonstrates the feasibility of our ideas. This feasibility is also illustrated with several applications of the tool kit to real life processes. Apart from the development of the PrICE approach and tool kit, the thesis includes several other contributions. A contribution is the creation of correct process models. We refer to a process model as correct if the workflow structure is sound and if the data distribution is correct. A correct data distribution is an assignment of the data elements to the tasks in the process in such a way that the data elements necessary for the execution of a task have been written when the task becomes enabled. Requirements on the workflow structure and data distribution are set on the selection of process parts and the creation of alternatives to ensure the construction of correct process alternatives. Another contribution is the overview of the created process alternatives with the process alternatives tree. An alternative model may be created from the original model (the root node) or from one of the alternative models (any other node). The alternatives tree is also used as input for the evaluation of the performance of the alternatives and to provide an overview of the simulation results. A final contribution is the enhancement of the practical use of simulation for process redesign. On the one hand, the automation of the simulation study reduces the necessary time investment because intermediate input from the user is not required. On the other hand, we present a simulation plan that facilitates the understanding of the various aspects that should be addressed in a simulation study
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
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