Organization and Location

Value chain organizations reflect cooperation and collaboration between partners.
As we have seen, the collaborating organizations will put in place governance
models that manage the shared affairs of the extended enterprise. The
authors believe that these foundations will pave the way for a few value chains
to achieve level 5.
Such governance models require the provision of performance data to be
collected across the extended enterprise How else will they govern? Increasingly,
this will become the province of automated processes, written under
appropriate BPML protocols, which will automatically collect the relevant
information from the various enterprise systems and present it in a collated form
as and when needed. Again, the foundations of process management are seen
to be an essential part of the inter-enterprise collaboration.
Private Implementations (one for each partner). The Public Interface
is common to the partners and is supported by protocols such as
ebXML, RosettaNet, and BizTalk. The Private Implementations are
specific to every partner and are described in any executable language.
BPML is one such language.
Without an agreed and shared way of describing processes, changing from
one partner to another in the chain or improving the operation of processes
across the process boundaries becomes more and more complex and will be a
real drag on the value chain�s ability to improve and compete. With a shared
protocol, the inhibitions are removed and the extended enterprise processes run
straight through as though they are part of a single enterprise.
A simple order-to-cash process in one company
can not only be replicated in other companies in the value chain, but can also
provide the clear interface points between companies: order placing and accepting,
goods dispatch and receipt, and invoice to payment.
With a proper set of process protocols in place, noncore processes can be
alternatively sourced, without the fear of interfacing problems or becoming
locked into an unsatisfactory situation.