PurposeOrganizational process improvement plays an important role for sustaining business in a competitive environment. Therefore, enterprise leaders are increasingly prone to adopt business process improvement (BPI) practices. However, organizations are unable to implement formal and reusable solutions, representing a gap between academic research and practical use. In addition, companies adopt discipline-dependent solutions, lacking BPI representations of best practices applicable to all organizational divisions. This paper aims to propose some constructs on top of the Quintessence kernel for representing the practice systematic development of the BPI in the BPI lifecycle and we conduct two case studies in a multinational company.Design/methodology/approachA quantitative research design was adopted for recognizing gaps in previous approaches and identifying best BPI practices. Subsequently, characterization of practices and activities are represented based on a unified definition model and the Quintessence kernel. Finally, two case studies are developed for applying the solution.FindingsThe formal representation is applicable to multiple disciplines in organizational environments. Besides, the sub-alphas (abstract level progress health attribute) states and the work products resulting from each activity completion criteria evidence the health and progress accomplished during the practice execution.Originality/valueThe practice representation serves as a formal, graphical, reusable and multidiscipline guide compiling activities and tasks for systematically developing BPI during the radical/incremental improvement lifecycle.

Objetive: provide a scalable environment to represent the concepts of the basic profile of the ISO / IEC 29110 standard for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and their relationships. Methodology: In this paper we propose a novel approach for generating an ontology related to the ISO/IEC 29110 basic profile. We follow some steps: (i) modeling the domain by using executable pre-conceptual schemas; (ii) creating equivalences between pre-conceptual schemas and ontology elements; (iii) translating such equivalences into Protégé, an ontology-based environment; and (iv) creating rules for inferring knowledge from the ontology in order to overcome the aforementioned problems. Results: We create an ontology related to concepts of the ISO/IEC 29110 and their relations in its basic profile. We also answer questions in order to ease the implementation process of the ISO/IEC 29110 basic profile. Conclusions: The resulting ontology serves as support for VSEs and academics when implementing or teaching the basic profile of the ISO/IEC 29110.