Redesigning Contracted Service Procurement for Internet-Based Electronic Commerce: A Case Study

This paper describes a case study focused on redesigning procurement processes for research grants management at the U.S. Office of Naval Research. These processes focus on the procurement of R&D services, and how they can be redesigned and supported using Web-based capabilities. Through the application of empirical results and theoretical concepts from business process reengineering, electronic commerce, and IT-based process management, we gain insight into issues and challenges to be addressed in redesigning the procurement of contracted services with Web-based EC capabilities. Accordingly, four research questions are identified and addressed which build from these results and concepts. Finally, in collaboration with other participants in this effort, the case study reveals that we could contribute to a substantial reduction in process cycle time and operational costs associated with the annual funding of thousands of research grant procurement actions at ONR.     

Reengineering Through Simulation Modeling

Simulation models are a practical tool for reengineering and redesigning processes and workflows, because they infuse management discussions with the quantitative data needed for sound decision making. The Government Printing Office's use of a discrete-event simulation model helps illustrate the tool's potential to increase revenue, improve customer service, and optimize resource utilization in the area of telephone ordering.     

Business process reengineering — A case study

Recently, many companies in China try their best to reform their own management systems from original central planning economic systems into market economic systems. Some design reengineering to win competition in the market. The paper gives a case study for business process reengineering in a large aircraft manufacturing company in China.

What they do are as followings: 1. To set up a new planning and scheduling system. The most important discipline is Just In Time. 2. The company change the production planning organizations from four levels into one level. 3. The production planning department work out the four kinds of schedules. 4. To set up a new personnel management system. 5. To redesign the assembly process. i.e., to improved the assembly equipment, reduced the positions from nineteen to eight. 6. To design and implement the computer information systems for supporting all these redesigning. There expert systems and group decision support systems are now running in the computer networks.     

IT-enabled organizational transformation: a case study of BPR failure at TELECO

This case study describes a business process reengineering (BPR) initiative undertaken by a US telecommunications company (TELECO) in response to imminent survival-threatening competitive pressures in its traditionally monopolistic market. The case study, first, highlights some of the seldom talked-about problems faced during the redesigning of business processes such as: the lack of detailed knowledge about functional areas; hidden agendas of top management; lack of knowledge of (and over-reliance on) computer-based BPR tools; poor choice of metaphors in the organizational language; and the lack of communication. Thereafter, the case study identifies critical problems faced in implementing redesigned processes. These problems include: the difficulty in creating an atmosphere of open communication; pressures against selecting IT vendors on merit; lack of awareness of the lead times associated with IT; uncoordinated implementation of HR and IT strategies; and discontinuities in the leadership. While we hope that the reader will be sensitized to the issues highlighted in the narrative and will individually derive lessons for application in familiar contexts, we nevertheless provide a discussion on three issues that, in our opinion, significantly contributed to BPR “failure” at TELECO.     

REINVENTING THROUGH REENGINEERING

Reinventing through, reengineering targets traditional business practices to renew leadership and optimize an enterprise's competitive position and shareholder value. This article dispels the myths that have led to unsuccessful reengineering efforts, discusses the elevated role of information technology in the reengineering process, and presents a comprehensive reengineering work plan for achieving a true enterprisewide transformation.     

Iterative reengineering of legacy systems

During its life, a legacy system is subjected to many maintenance activities, which cause degradation of the quality of the system: When this degradation exceeds a critical threshold, the legacy system needs to be reengineered. In order to preserve the asset represented by the legacy system, the familiarity with it gained by the system's maintainers and users, and the continuity of execution of current operations during the reengineering process, the system needs to be reengineered gradually. Moreover, each program needs to be reengineered within a short period of time. The paper proposes a reengineering process model, which is applied to an in-use legacy system to confirm that the process satisfies previous requirements and to measure its effectiveness. The reengineered system replaced the legacy one to the satisfaction of all the stakeholders; the reengineering process also had a satisfactory impact on the quality of the system. Finally, this paper contributes to validate the cause-effect relationship between the reengineering process and overcoming the aging symptoms of a software system.     

A methodology and tool environment for process analysis and reengineering

Most private and public organizations have recently turned their attention to the process by which they operate, to improve service and product quality and customer satisfaction. To support business process reengineering, methods and tools for process modeling and analysis are required. The paper presents the ARTEMIS methodology and associated tool environment for business process analysis for reengineering. In the ARTEMIS methodological framework, business processes are modeled as workflows and are analyzed according to an organizational structure perspective and an operational structure perspective. With these two perspectives, the analyst can plan reengineering interventions based on the degree of autonomy/dependency of organization units in terms of coupling, and the inter-process semantic correspondences, in terms of data and operation similarity, respectively. The ARTEMIS methodology and associated tool environment have been conceived and applied in the framework of the PROGRESS research project. In the paper, we report on a reengineering case study of this project involving the Italian Ministry of Justice.     

Web-based business process reengineering

Software reengineering is not a widely accepted practice, but its methods and tools are critical to the success of business process reengineering (BPR). Reengineering software starts with an understanding of the existing system and an identification of those components that support the new business processes “as-is” and those that may have to be changed. Software reengineering would become widely used if the technology was more automated, more accessible and less complicated. Transformational reengineering encompasses available techniques for reverse engineering, reengineering and reuse, as well as the new medium of the World Wide Web (WWW). Using the WWW, the “as-is” and “to-be” designs can be made available for viewing and distribution. The author provides insight into the future of BPR and software reengineering using the WWW     

基于UML的销售流程优化及仿真

以订单销售流程为例,借鉴面向对象的分析方法,采用流程重组的思路,用UML对销售订单过程静态和动态结合的建模。通过用例图描述系统的功能需求和参与者,给出系统的总体框架,用活动图分析了订单销售业务过程中对象之间的关系,并结合流程优化的原则进行优化,得到有效的系统重组方案。最后通过SIMPROCESS仿真工具仿真订单销售流程,通过对仿真结果分析,证明该流程优化的效果。     

PRODUCTIVITY GAINS OF BPR Achieving Success Where Others Have Failed

IT-induced business process reengineering (BPR) offers promise of dramatic performance improvements in productivity and quality and can form a vital component of an ongoing total quality management (TQM) program. IS managers can take the lead in informing the reengineering process of technology's possibilities and facilitating process innovation through technology application.     

业务流程重组在制造企业中的作用

业务流程重组通过对企业现有业务流程进行根本性的再思考和彻底性的再设计,使制造企业在成本、质量、服务和速度方面取得显著的改善.本文通过实例来说明了业务流程重组在制造企业中的作用.     

Mapping Procedural Patterns to Object-Oriented Design Patterns

This paper presents a new approach to the use of design patterns for the reengineering of legacy code, using a mapping from procedural design patterns to object-oriented patterns. We show also how object-oriented design patterns can be formalised and correctness conditions for their application derived, in order to justify the preservation of functionality in the reengineering process. We give examples taken from case studies of reengineering legacy COBOL applications.     

供需链系统重构的方法与工具研究

基于SCOR模型以及供需链的性能分析，提出了一套可操作的供需链系统重构方法，涵盖了供需链的建模、分析、改进、实施等各个阶段，并且介绍了为使供需链系统的重构过程自动化和智能化而自行设计并开发的软件工具—SCEasy Transfer。     

Software reengineering for complex systems

Reengineering complex software is a difficult task that requires the expenditure of significant resources. To reduce associated costs and improve resultant systems, automated techniques have been developed that can be used throughout all phases of the reengineering process. Three systems are described that have been used successfully for reengineering at The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. The first system automatically transforms software written in CMS-2 to software written in Ada. The second system supports database design and automated query formulation, and employs conceptual-level intermediate representations for reverse and forward engineering as well as reengineering. The final system utilizes automated techniques to reengineer critical functions for performance enhancement. The systems described are evolving, and will provide a basis for future reengineering efforts.     

On the application of model-driven engineering in data reengineering

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) emphasizes the systematic use of models to improve software productivity and some aspects of the software quality such as maintainability or interoperability. Model-driven techniques have proven useful not only as regards developing new software applications but also the reengineering of legacy systems. Models and metamodels provide a high-level formalism with which to represent artefacts commonly manipulated in the different stages of a software evolution process (e.g., a software migration) while model transformation allows the automation of the evolution tasks to be performed. Some approaches and experiences of model-driven software reengineering have recently been presented but they have been focused on the code while data reengineering aspects have been overlooked. The objective of this work is to assess to what extent data reengineering processes could also take advantage of MDE techniques.The article starts by characterising data-reengineering in terms of the tasks involved. It then goes on to state that MDE is particularly amenable as regards addressing the tasks previously identified. We present an MDE-based approach for the reengineering of data whose purpose is to improve the quality of the logical schema in a relational data migration scenario. As a proof of concept, the approach is illustrated for two common problems in data re-engineering: undeclared foreign keys and disabled constraints. This approach is organised following the three stages of a software reengineering process: reverse engineering, restructuring and forward engineering. We show how each stage is implemented by means of model transformation chains. A running example is used to illustrate each stage of the process throughout the article. The approach is validated with a real widely-used database. An assessment of the application of MDE in each stage is then presented, and we conclude by identifying the main benefits and drawbacks of using MDE in data reengineering.     

Low-effort, high-payoff user interface reengineering

Although increasingly sophisticated design methodologies for developing new user interfaces exist, low-effort, high-payoff user interface reengineering represents a new direction-and opportunity. Yet reengineering a working system is complex and risky because of the potential disruption to users and managers, their justifiable fear of change, and the lack of guarantees that such changes will be for the better. Our largely positive experiences with the projects described here lead us to believe that user interface reengineering is a viable and important process. Low effort, high-payoff improvement recommendations can probably be made for most existing systems. Nevertheless, a narrowly focused user interface reengineering plan may be inappropriate when the major problems lie outside the scope of the user interface, such as inadequate functionalities, frequent crashes, and network problems. Attempts at improving less severe problems while ignoring deeper ones may be perceived as insensitive by the users. In such cases it is important to consider either making similar short-term improvements for other parts of the systems or postponing short-term user interface reengineering in favour of a more complete system reengineering. Similarly, the need for interface stability might outweigh the benefits of the short-term improvements if a complete reengineering is planned for the near future. But most likely these proposed diagnostic strategies and opportunities for improvement are only a prelude to the much larger task of business reengineering, which implies extensive user interface reengineering     

Process analysis and reengineering

To achieve meaningful improvements of the process performance measures such as quality, speed, service, and cost, fundamental rethinking and redesign of the underlying process is required. Numerous corporations have been forced to change their processes in order to survive in a highly competitive market. To perform analysis and reengineering of processes, a structured and unified approach is required. In this paper, a framework based on the IDEF methodology, stream analysis approach, and dynamic simulation for process analysis and reengineering is presented. The stream analysis approach is used for analysis, diagnosis, and management of process changes represented with an IDEF model. To evaluate the impact of changes considered, support the process analysis, and to model performance of the proposed process, a dynamic simulation is used. This study extends the IDEF methodology by including quantitative information. The latter improves IDEF process analysis and reengineering capability, and facilitates the formulation of a dynamic simulation model. The significance of the results presented in the paper arises from the fact that many companies, e.g. Lockheed–Martin, General Motors, Rockwell International, are using IDEF for representing their processes.     

Metrics for assessment of designs and implementations during reengineering of computer-based systems

Modern computer-based systems have many required characteristics, including performance, concurrency, timeliness, availability, dependability, safety and security. Aging computer-based systems are being reengineered to exploit distributed and highly parallel hardware platforms, in order to accommodate increased functional requirements and to achieve dependability. Simultaneously, reengineering is introducing modern software engineering principles such as component layering, encapsulation and information hiding, in order to reduce maintenance burdens and to simplify future enhancement. This paper summarizes a process for reengineering of computer-based systems to achieve these goals. The process incorporates experience gained through the reengineering of the Weapons Selection module and the Surface Operations module of the AEGIS Weapon System. A key component of the reengineering process is themission critical software architecture (MCSA), a hierarchical view of systems that includes the abstraction levels of programs, tasks, packages, procedures, and statements. To guide the reengineering processes of software transformation, concurrency metrics are defined at the procedure, package and task levels of the MCSA. The paper defines the intermediate representation (IR) needed to compute the metrics, and shows how to use the IR to compute several metrics: the percentage of concurrency within procedures and packages, and the amount of potential concurrency among tasks. The metrics are important in any reengineering approach that iteratively transforms design and code, or that deals with system configuration (the integration of software, hardware and humanware).This work is supported in part by the US NSWC (N00178-95-R-2007, N60921-94-M-6096, N60921-94-M-1960, N60921-94-M-2555, N60921-95-M-0311), by the State of New Jersey (SBR-421290), and by the US ONR(N00014-92-J-1367).     

基于系统重建的数据采集器的设计与实现

以一个数据采集系统的设计与实现过程为例，介绍了一种对遗留系统开发行之有效的方法－系统重建。介绍了该采集系统重建的过程，通过这些介绍，可以看到重建思想的作用。最后讨论了系统重建过程中一些相关原则。