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The Airbus company has used OntoREM, a semi-automated methodology developed at UWE Bristol, for developing systems' requirements specifications and improving the quality of such specifications. This has saved Airbus [text removed for publication] cost and time to develop aircraft operability requirements for wing design and industrialisation in two different aircraft programmes — with a significant increase in requirements reusability. It has enabled improved assessment of risk in advance of a project's start through prior estimation of the cost and time of developing requirements. This has allowed reliable forecasts and scheduling, and better management of the expectations of a project's key stakeholders.
All too many IT projects fail, as many as 80%. To improve systems design in the public sector, Wastell has undertaken a sustained programme of action research, the main fruit being a design and innovation methodology, known as SPRINT. Its deployment has generated impressive benefits, e.g. a recent project produced an innovative set of tools for improving safeguarding in healthcare. Wastell's research has also highlighted the dysfunctions of the Integrated Children's System (ICS), a national IT initiative in social care. The research directly influenced the redesign of the ICS, feeding into the Munro Review of Child Protection, and has guided subsequent design work on IT for social care.
Building on research in integrated information systems and their impact on organisational culture, Newcastle Business School (NBS), via a two-year Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP 8193), assisted Inpipe Products (IPP) to increase its operational efficiency and turnover. IPP is a world leading company in the design, manufacture, supply and rental of pipeline maintenance equipment for the global oil and gas industry. The KTP explored and developed the cultural environment for successful implementation of an integrated information system. The result for the company is improved operational efficiency, with the processing time for products from sales to engineered drawings reduced from five hours to 15 minutes, a reduction in late deliveries due to better information on product specification and a 14% reduction in rejected products. Product sales turnover has increased from £5.5 million to £6 million per year.
Research in organisational decision making has led to the establishment of a Sentencing Information System for the Republic of Ireland (ISIS) which enables judges, lawyers and the public to access information on sentencing patterns within the Republic of Ireland. "ISIS enables Judges and others engaged in the sentencing process... to develop their knowledge and understanding of sentencing practices. This ...benefits the understanding of defendants and witnesses, including victims of the entire process. All of this is being done without jeopardizing judicial independence and impartiality" (Source 9). With 7000 user visits annually from 84 different countries, ISIS has international impact on increasing the transparency of judicial decision-making, is widely regarded as a particularly significant development in legal processes, has stimulated public discussion on sentencing patterns and is informing public policy in the management of the criminal justice system.
Research into new process modelling tools and numerical simulation and optimisation algorithms at Imperial's Centre for Process Systems Engineering (CPSE) has resulted in a powerful new modelling technology. In 1997, a team from (CPSE) established a spin-out company, Process Systems Enterprise Ltd (PSE, www.psenterprise.com), to commercialise this process and energy systems modelling platform — gPROMSTM and to provide associated leading-edge model based services such as the design of new processes and the optimisation of existing processes.
Based on turnover (£400k at launch to £10m today), PSE is now recognised as a leading provider of process modelling technology and modelling platforms, with over 100 employees in high-end jobs. Its customers include most of the world's leading chemical, energy and automotive companies (e.g. Dow Chemical, BASF, BP, Shell, ExxonMobil, Toyota, Honda, Ford, Mitsubishi Chemicals) and it has a strong international presence with offices in the UK, US, Germany, Japan and Korea and agencies in China, India, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. The overall benefit to industry over the REF period is estimated to be £400m. The software allows customers to model, understand and optimise their processes in an unprecedented manner, leading to improved designs and more efficient operations. The gPROMSTM software is used in over 200 universities for both teaching and research (primarily the latter), where it enables research into new chemical and energy processes to take place.
BRITEST is a global leader in the development of innovative process solutions for the chemical processing sector with > £500m of value being realized since 2008. Research in Manchester (1997-2000) generated a set of novel tools and methodologies which analyse chemical processes to identify where and how process improvements could be made. BRITEST was established in 2001 as a not-for-profit company to manage the technology transfer and effective deployment of these tools and methodologies into industry. Manchester holds the IP arising from the underpinning research and has granted an exclusive license to BRITEST for use and exploitation of the toolkit.
Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), developed by Peter Checkland and colleagues at Lancaster University, has been adopted worldwide for tackling complex problems in both private and public sectors. It is used widely in consulting practice, leading to major business and economic impacts. In examples 1 and 2 we report major impacts, including a reshaped multi-national business and extra profits of RMB 50M in a Chinese company. In addition, SSM has helped effect major cultural change within multinational business as described in example 3 and has been adopted as part of mainstream business analysis (examples 4, 5 and 6). This has been achieved through a deliberate policy of action research and post-experience education, supported by academic and practitioner-oriented books.
Modern processor architectures (networked multi/many-core nodes), together with society's expectation of evermore-complex applications, require fluent mastery of concurrency. To enable this mastery, in the last two decades our group has taught, researched and developed fundamental notions of concurrency, new programming languages (occam-pi, and the KRoC toolset), libraries (JCSP, CCSP, C++CSP, CHP), runtime systems (the KRoC/CCSP multicore scheduler) and tools based on formal process algebra (Hoare's CSP, and Milner's pi-calculus).
Our work has had impact in providing new mechanisms for software development in a number of sectors such as chip design, large-scale real-time systems, formal interfaces and testing and the space industry. Testimonials supporting this are available from a variety of industrial and commercial sources (NXP Semiconductors, Big Bee Consultants, Philips Healthcare, 4Links Ltd. and Microsoft Research Cambridge). The breadth of impact of the work is evidenced by download statistics, as well as by third-party contributions to libraries and documentation.
This case is based on economic impact. It shows how research by Professor Michael Wooldridge at the University of Liverpool on the Gaia Methodology for agent-oriented software engineering improved the performance of the Swiss company Whitestein Technologies AG and of international users of its key product. Specifically, the research enabled Whitestein to develop its business process management system (BPM) Living Systems Process Suite which delivers several million pounds per year of revenues, corresponding to 50% of their total business revenues. Users of Whitestein's Living Systems Process Suite since 2008 include Daimler AG, Transcor Astra Group, Vienna Insurance Group, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. In 2010 Gartner, the world's leading IT advisory company, recognized the impact and innovation of the Living Systems Process Suite by naming Whitestein a Cool Vendor in BPM.
Aston University has developed systems thinking, specifically soft systems thinking, into a new approach known as the Process Orientated Holonic (PrOH) Modelling Methodology which has been used to model, debate and implement changes to strategy and operational processes in service and manufacturing organisations. Through PrOH Modelling our research has changed the awareness, use, and long term legacy effect in a variety of organisations as exemplified here by 4 cases in which considerable operational and financial impacts have accrued. These impacts have been achieved by (i) increasing awareness of systems thinking, particularly soft systems thinking, by management (ii) implementing use of soft systems thinking (as PrOH modelling) to give demonstrable organisational improvement in specific change projects, and (iii) ensuring a legacy effect of systems thinking practice, as managers' use of systems thinking is more effective after an initial Aston University led project has been completed.