Analyzing inter-organizational business processes

Companies are increasingly embedded in B2B environments, where they have to collaborate in order to achieve their goals. Such collaborations lead to inter-organizational business processes that may be commonly supported through the exchange of electronic data interchange (EDI) messages (e.g., electronic purchase orders, invoices etc.). Despite the appearance of XML, traditional approaches to EDI, such as EDIFACT and ANSI X.12, still play an overwhelmingly dominant role. However, such traditional EDI standards lack a notion of process. In other words, the exchanged business documents are typically not embedded in the context of other exchanged business documents. This has two shortcomings: (1) the inability to apply proven business process management (BPM) methods, including process mining techniques, in such settings; and (2) the unavailability of systematic approaches to business intelligence (BI) using information from exchanged EDI messages. In this article, we present the EDImine Framework for enabling (1) the application of process mining techniques in the field of EDI-supported inter-organizational business processes, and (2) for supporting inter-organizational performance evaluation using business information from EDI messages, event logs and process models. As an enabling technology, we present a method for the semantic preprocessing of EDIFACT messages to exploit this potentially rich source of information by applying state of the art BPM and BI techniques. We show the applicability of our approach by means of a case study based on real-world EDI data of a German consumer goods manufacturing company.     

Inter-organizational success factors: a cause and effect model

Inter-organizational systems form the basis for successful business collaboration in the Internet and B2B e-commerce era. To properly design and manage such systems one needs to understand the structure and dynamics of the relationships between organizations. The evaluation of such inter-organizational relationships (IORs) is normally conducted using “success factors”. These are often referred to as constructs, such as trust and information sharing. In strategic management and performance analysis, different methods are employed for evaluating business performance and strategies, such as the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) method. The BSC utilizes success factors for measuring and monitoring IORs against business strategies. For these reasons, a thorough understanding of success factors, the relationships between them, as well as their relationship to business strategies is required. In other words, understanding success factors allows strategists deriving measurements for success factors as well as aligning these success factors with business strategies. This underpins nowadays close relationship between business strategy, IORs and their realization by means of inter-organizational systems. In this paper, we present (1) a systematic literature review studying success factors and their impact on IORs as well as (2) an analysis of the results found. The review is based on 177 publications, published between 2000 and 2012, dealing with factors influencing IORs. The work presented provides an overview on success factors, influencing relationships between success factors, as well as their influence on the success of IORs. The work is somehow “meta-empirical” as it only looks at published studies and not on own cases. Consequently, it is based on the assumption that studies in scientific literature represent the real-world. The constructs and relationships found in the review are grouped based on their scope and summarized in a cause and effect model. The grouping of constructs results in five groups including Relationship Orientation, Relational Norm, Relational Capital, Atmosphere, and Others. Since the cause and effect model represents a directed graph, different network analysis methods may be applied for analyzing the model. In particular, an in- and out-degree analysis is applied on the cause and effect model for detecting the most influencing as well as the most influenced success factors.     

Formation of Elastic Whey Protein Gels at Low pH by Acid Equilibration

Abstract: Whey protein gels have a weak/brittle texture when formed at pH ≤ 4.5, yet this pH is required to produce a high-protein, shelf-stable product. We investigated if gels could be made under conditions that produced strong/elastic textural properties then adjusted to pH ≤ 4.5 and maintain textural properties. Gels were initially formed at 15% w/w protein (pH 7.5). Equilibration in acid solutions caused gel swelling and lowered pH because of the diffusion of water and H⁺ into the gels. The type and concentration of acid, and presence of other ions, in the equilibrating solutions influenced pH, swelling ratio, and fracture properties of the gels. Swelling of gels decreased fracture stress (because of decreased protein network density) but caused little change to fracture strain, thus maintaining a desirable strong/elastic fracture pattern. We have shown that whey protein isolate gels can be made at pH ≤ 4.5 with a strong/elastic fracture pattern and the magnitude of this pattern can be altered by varying the acid type, acid concentration, pH of equilibrating solution, and equilibrating time. Practical Application: Low-pH shelf-stable whey protein gels having the strong/elastic texture can be made by forming gels at high pH and equilibrating in acid solutions. Acid equilibration causes the gel to swell and lower the gel pH. Moreover, gel properties can be altered by varying the acid type, acid concentration, pH of equilibrating solution, and equilibrating time.