title: Advanced Process Digitalization, Compliance, and Automation
Creators: name: König, Ulrich Matthias
Publisher: name: University of Bayreuth
Year: 2021
Subjects: subject: Digitalization
subject: Business Process Management
subject: Compliance
subject: Automation
subject: Frameworks
subject: Artifacts
subject: 000
subject: 330

description: Digitalization brings with it ongoing socio-technical change, including new and innovative ways of interacting and technological developments. In response, both academia and industry must continually rethink and improve methods, approaches, structures, and applications if they are to thrive in the digital age. In particular, the corporate success of organizations relies on their ability to react appropriately to changing conditions. Business process management (BPM) traditionally helps organizations to ensure corporate success. BPM has recently also offered methods to explore and innovate business processes, leading to the creation of new products or services. BPM enriched by digital solutions enables new business processes and value propositions and transforms those already in existence. Digital transformation also impacts, among other things, management styles, individual behavior, compliance, and automation capabilities. Consequently, BPM must continuously adjust to react appropriately to new developments driven by the digital age. Yet, BPM emphasizes the need to understand the influence of the digital age before enacting change. Such understanding is seen as a crucial prerequisite to adequately address the changing needs. Developed in response to such shift, this cumulative doctoral thesis consists of five research articles that provide insight into BPM in the digital age and provide guidance for both industry and academia by reconceptualizing BPM’s capabilities. Furthermore, the in-depth investigation of two capability areas (i.e., “Process Compliance Management” and “Advanced Process Automation”) addresses challenges and opportunities considered important from an expert perspective. Firstly, this thesis presents an overview of the impact of changing conditions and an updated capability framework. Secondly, this thesis examines “Process Compliance Management” in terms of process deviance and presents an innovative strategy for creating positive process deviations. Thirdly, the incorporation of mobile devices into manufacturing highlights the potential of “Advanced Process Automation”. The theoretical foundation of the thesis is a capability framework consisting of five core elements and 30 equally distributed capability areas (research article #1). In response, a framework consisting of 33 reasons for deviance applies a management perspective to explain why process deviations occur (research article #2). Following this, positive process deviance provides the analytical lens in an experiment that uses digital nudging to leverage positive deviations as a starting point for process improvements (research article #3). This thesis then reveals how mobile devices automate production processes (research article #4). Finally, the incorporation of smartphones demonstrates their potential as data collectors and facilitators of predictive maintenance and decision support technology (research article #5).