4 January 2023 - 4 January 2023
On Wednesday 4 January 2024, Diana CARDENAS CRISTANCHO will defend her doctoral thesis in amphitheatre 1 at ENSGSI by videoconference. The thesis is entitled: Helping to measure and improve business performance in the context of Industry 4.0
In the context of Industry 4.0, organizations are constantly confronted with the need to keep on improving their performance in a continuous basis while rationalizing their resources in order to remain competitive in the complex market. For which the Continuous Improvement of Performance (CIP) has been widely recognized by academics and practitioners as a key approach. Nevertheless, recent studies are highlighting a high rate of failed implementations, which raises concerns on the need of clarifying the process of the CIP, and more specifically in how to improve the decision-making within it. Organizations seeking to improve and adapt to increasingly uncertain conditions need to move away from relying on intuitive and satisficing approaches, and instead embrace complexity in their decision-making to become more assertive in improving their performance and sustaining it over time. Therefore, this thesis seeks to assist CIP managers and engineers in better stablishing a performance strategy and thus improving the performance under a systemic approach. Consequently, throughout this thesis (1) the CIP process is clarified and formalized through a MASK-KROM approach; (2) based on a literature review and DEMATEL method, an approach for identifying and analyzing the influence interrelationships of performance indicators is developed; and (3) a Decision Support System architecture including an ontology that integrates the complexity of the performance indicator-practice-tool interrelationships is proposed and evaluated. Altogether, it constitutes a methodological approach that helps in eliciting the most relevant performance indicators, and in prioritizing the improvement practices and tools to implement for improving the performance.