DBIS

Congratulations! Matthias Lohrmann successfully defended his PhD thesis

Ulm University

On June 1st, 2015 Opens internal link in current windowMatthias Lohrmann successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled

Opens external link in new windowBusiness Process Quality Management

at Ulm University, Germany. The DBIS team is pleased to congratulate Matthias on his successful PhD defense and wishes him all the best for his future. Matthias' PhD advisor and PhD promotor has been Opens internal link in current windowProf. Dr. Manfred Reichert.

During the past 25 years, research in the field of business process management as well as the practical adoption of corresponding methods and tools have made substantial progress. In particular, this development was driven by the insight that well-managed business processes enable organizations to better serve their stakeholders, save costs and, ultimately, realize competitive advantage. It is therefore not surprising that improving business processes ranks high on the list of priorities of organizations. In practice, this challenge is currently being addressed through approaches such as benchmarking, industry-specific best practice reference models or process reengineering heuristics. However, no systematic and generic proposition towards managing business process quality has achieved broad acceptance yet.

To address this gap, Matthias' thesis contributes to the field of business process quality management. First, it defines a concise notion of business process quality based on organizational targets, and applies it to a sample real-world case. This definition is not specific to any particular application field, and thus constitutes a vital first step towards systematic and generic business process quality management. On that basis, an approach is developed to model business objectives in the sense of the requirements that shall be fulfilled by the results of a business process. In turn, this approach enables appraising whether a business process achieves its business objective as one of the core criteria relevant to business process quality. Further, extensions to common business process meta-models are proposed, which enable quality-aware business process modeling, and demonstrates how fundamental quality characteristics can be derived from corresponding models.

Members of the PhD committee:

  • Prof. Dr. Uwe Schöning (Chairman)
  • Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert (Promotor and First Referee)
  • Prof. Dr. Hajo A. Reijers (Second Referee)
  • Prof. Dr. Franz Schweiggert (Core Committee Member)
  • Prof. Dr. Paul Wentges (Core Committee Member)