| EPSRC Reference: |
EP/C54899X/1 |
| Title: |
Intelligent Decision Support for Process Re-design and Conformance (Intelli-Process) |
| Principal Investigator: |
Tiwari, Professor A |
| Other Investigators: |
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| Researcher Co-Investigators: |
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| Project Partners: |
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| Department: |
Sch of Industrial and Manufacturing Scie |
| Organisation: |
Cranfield University |
| Scheme: |
First Grant Scheme Pre-FEC |
| Starts: |
19 September 2005 |
Ends: |
18 September 2008 |
Value (£): |
126,595
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| EPSRC Research Topic Classifications: |
| Manufact. Enterprise Ops& Mgmt |
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Summary on Grant Application Form |
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The design and management of business processes is a key factor for companies to effectively compete in today's volatile business environment. By focusing on the optimisation and continuous improvement of business processes, organisations can establish a solid competitive advantage by reducing cost, improving quality and efficiency, and enabling adaptation to changing requirements. Processes are improved by following certain guiding principles, such as Lean Initiatives, Business Process Re-engineering, Total Quality Management, Six Sigma and Working Practice Improvement. Based on these principles, there are a number of initiatives to improve processes within organisations. However, most of these initiatives are manual, expensive and time-consuming due to the complex subjective nature of process re-design. Process improvement is partly based on detailed studies about the processes and partly on subjective decisions involving human judgement. Furthermore, many of these studies are underutilised since it is difficult to check if the people are actually conforming to the suggested optimised process. Therefore, the challenge is to facilitate automated mapping of the current business processes within an organisation, capture the knowledge elements to partly automate the development of optimised process model, and then monitor people for conformance to that model.The aim of this project is to develop a novel and generic Soft Computing based framework for: (a) automated capturing of business processes, (b) optimising the process design interactively, and (c) identifying the extent of conformance with the optimal. Soft Computing is a consortium of methodologies (such as Fuzzy Logic, Neural Networks and Evolutionary Computation) that exploits the tolerance for imprecision, uncertainty, approximate reasoning and partial truth in order to mimic the remarkable human capability of making decisions in real-life ambiguous environment. Soft Computing therefore helps in dealing with subjective/qualitative information and knowledge, and also helps in monitoring people's performance. It has become popular in developing systems that encapsulate human expertise. The application scope of the proposed project is in the computer assisted business processes within Service and IT industries. Examples include order processing, fault/complaint handling and software development. This project will be carried out by Cranfield University, in collaboration with BT and Engineous Software Ltd.
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Key Findings |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Potential use in non-academic contexts |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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Impacts |
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| Description |
This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk |
| Summary |
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| Date Materialised |
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Sectors submitted by the Researcher |
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This information can now be found on Gateway to Research (GtR) http://gtr.rcuk.ac.uk
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| Project URL: |
http://www.cranfield.ac.uk/sas/decisionengineering/research/projects/bpmo/index.jsp |
| Further Information: |
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| Organisation Website: |
http://www.cranfield.ac.uk |