BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT AS THE BREAKTHROUGH

The challenges of integrating processes and knowledge within and across enterprises
are best answered by a combination of:
_ A visionary technical architecture:
_ To which the (extended) enterprise can transition over time
_ Which will allow the business to adopt new processes, applications,
and technologies quickly and efficiently
_ Which avoid redeveloping large portions of legacy software
_ Without disrupting existing users
_ Business process management systems provide:
_ A new generation of tools that put the management of business
processes back with the business community, freeing the IT community
to do what it does best � enable the processes with the best
available technology
On the upstream side, there can be multiple supply partners, and not just
raw material suppliers, including those helping with new product design or
product offerings, component suppliers, or contract manufacturers. In the middle,
there could be linked manufacturers, each making part of the final product, such
as Boeing and its major manufacturing partners engaged in constructing the new
7E7 airplane. Contractors in Japan, Europe, and the United States will be involved
in that endeavor. Distributors often play a key role in moving the products
to market as well, and because of their ability to service remote geographies,
multiple constituents might be used. In high-technology equipment, it is
usual to have value-added resellers involved in the processing. At the top of
Figure 2.1, we note that industry process hubs could be used, as well as industry
marketplaces or some form of portal for handling part of the processing, particularly
the sourcing function. At the bottom, we note several constituents
handling part of the logistics function. When we then consider that there are
now many types of end customers and consumers, the picture does indeed
become complex.
Any supply chain analysis that is limited to internal processing, which is a
small segment of the inter-enterprise business system, is doomed to operate with
suboptimized conditions, because the focus is only on a part of the total network
illustrated in 1. There are simply too many players in a typical business
network, creating the possibility that one or more can introduce complications
that negate a part or most of the savings generated internally. The end-to-end
processing that has come under scrutiny for improvement by the industry leaders
now includes a multitude of business partners. Concurrently, the necessary
flow of information and knowledge within a business network has become as
important as the physical flow of goods and the transfer of money across what
is clearly an extended enterprise. Without access to that information, a system
is doomed to fall short of the intended optimized conditions.
The next issue deals with that need for information, which is often supplied
through the use of the appropriate technology and systems. As indicated in
Figure 2.2, we see that progressing through the supply chain maturity model
requires matching enabling technology with the process changes occurring between
levels. In the early levels (1 and 2), we see that the focus on divisional
or business unit performance instead of the total organization drives firms to
seek help with process optimization. Here we note the introduction of transportation
management systems and warehouse management systems, along with
efforts to improve order management and inventory management.