Business Process Automation

Frontmatter

Business Process Automation — Combining Best and Next Practices

Summary

In order to achieve constant growth and survive long term, enterprises have to innovate continuously. They therefore have to combine best and next business practices. Best practices ensure efficiency; next practices really lead to competitive advantages.

Traditional business process automation solutions such as ERP, SCM or CRM systems focus on the implementation of best practices. Next-generation process automation allows the implementation of next practices at an economically acceptable cost level. This is possible through a flexible combination of business process definition and software application support. The appropriate software support is dynamically configured with the business processes definition as a basis so that it enables the execution of enterprise-specific processes.

Business process models reflecting best and next practices drive the configuration of next-generation process automation solutions. They become the critical link between strategy and execution.

Mathias Kirchmer, August-Wilhelm Scheer

Process Automation Using the Real-Time Enterprise Concept

Summary

There are many facets to Business Process Automation. Alongside system automation through EAI, SAP Netweaver or classic ERP, CRM and SCM systems, today there is also the Real-Time Enterprise (RTE) concept, which has developed into a megatrend for businesses.

Time and again, however, isolated new IT solutions or strategic concepts obscure the view of the fundamental holistic approach of RTE. This presentation is intended to provide an overview of the potentials of and of the demands placed upon, an RTE, and to explain how Business Process Automation provides the basics for RTE. Various examples will be used to illustrate possible processes of and the use of RTE.

The purpose of this article is to illustrate an understanding of the customer’s desire for processing speed and quality as the source of the RTE approach, extending to process optimization and implementation of systems as the infrastructural basis of the real-time enterprise. We want to make clear that the automation of business processes, technology, strategy and management in businesses, particularly in the RTE, cannot exist independently of one another.

Ferri Abolhassan, Björn Welchering

ARIS Process PlatformTM and SAP NetWeaverTM: Next Generation Business Process Management

Summary

Business Process Management (BPM) projects have shown their positive impact on companies’ business. Shortcomings even from successful projects and lessons learned from failed attempts lead to the conviction that BPM must now take the next deciding step.

The goal is to reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) dramatically, to leverage existing IT investments and to raise usability and acceptance in the resulting systems.

To develop this Next Generation BPM, SAP AG and IDS Scheer AG decided to combine their knowledge and their leading software in that field.

Torsten Scholz, Karl Wagner

Dynamic and Mobile Business Process Management

Summary

This chapter provides an overview of the application of a combined business process modeling, business process execution, and business rule execution framework to solve a delivery planning problem in the supply-chain management area. Human decision-makers, automated decision-making systems and software systems are coordinated in a business process to effectively deal with and respond to late changes to orders by customers.

Donald Steiner

Automation of Manufacturing Support Processes at a Mid-Market Manufacturing Company, Utilizing SAP Solutions

Summary

Traditional manufacturing process automation initiatives have focused on direct manufacturing value-added activities (assembly, fabrication, material handling, etc). Logically, these activities are easiest to measure, to describe, to pinpoint deficiencies and to calculate improvement/ROI from automation projects. With the maturing of ERP software solutions and associated implementation methodologies, process automation projects can be successfully applied to white-collar support processes (accounting, customer service, production planning and control, supply chain management) as well. This case study illustrates the efforts to automate manufacturing support processes, using the SAP software solution, at the American Meter group of companies.

Ed Brady, Marc Scharsig

Business Process Automation: Automating and Monitoring the Mortgage Process

Summary

This case study illustrates the benefits gained from implementing the full lifecycle of BPM, i.e. from Process Design to Process Automation to Process monitoring. ABFS has implemented the full lifecycle for their Loan Origination Process and gained a 15% productivity increase within the first 3 months of implementation.

Yvonne Cook, Trevor Naidoo

Excellence in Vehicle Financing

Summary

DaimlerChrysler Bank invested into a Business Process Automation solution for their finance request process. The bank then decided to testcase ARIS Process Performance Manager to improve and manage the “Degree of Business Process Automation ”, boosting response times to customers, thus increasing customer satisfaction, “Hit Rates” and reducing costs due to fewer manual interactions.

Peter Westermann, Frank Gahse

EAI Goes Hollywood: Design of a Loosely Coupled Architecture to Manage Critical Business Data Flows at a Major Motion Picture Studio

Summary

An often overlooked reality when implementing a major ERP system such as SAP is that the new system will probably never replace all the legacy systems already in place. It generally becomes apparent pretty quickly that the new ERP system will need to share data with the legacy systems. Typically, in the past, these data flows have been managed by writing custom, point-to-point interfaces in which ASCII files are exported from one system and then imported into another for further processing.

Since the late 1990s, Enterprise Application Integration (commonly known as EAI) has captured the imagination of many an IS manager. And no wonder. Its promise is to integrate into a coherent and unified data processing model all applications within an enterprise, including legacy, hand-rolled custom apps and the more powerful breed of ERP systems such as SAP.

When a major Hollywood studio recently undertook a project to produce a Blueprint Design for the implementation of a new SAP system, EAI was high on their list of target accomplishments. There were literally hundreds of legacy systems, many of them hand-rolled on job databases and spreadsheets, that could not be shut down quickly, if ever, and that needed to participate in data flows with SAP. EDI was also a critical consideration. The challenge was to weave all these systems together in a business process-oriented way, including an existing EDI subsystem, into an EAI architecture that leveraged tools and skills that already existed within the organization.

Colin Western, Emmanuel Hadzipetros

A Process-Oriented Approach to Implementation of Microsoft Axapta at Bowne Global Solutions

Summary

When implementing a standard ERP package in a global environment, oftentimes the choice between customization and process change can be difficult to make. In order to design and configure a system that will satisfy all stakeholders in many countries conducting the same business, and minimize implementation costs, standardized global processes must be formulated.

The overall goal of a joint initiative between IDS-Scheer and Bowne Global Solutions was to define global accounting processes across more than 20 countries, and configure Microsoft Axapta accordingly to support those processes. The specific business goals were to reduce financial closing time to 5 days, significantly lower total cost of ownership, and to centralize finance and accounting functions.

Rajiv Lajmi, Jeff Michaels, Chris Snyder

U.S. Army Logistics Process Automation Based on SAP NetWeaver Technology

Summary

The Army logistics system is a complex series of processes, organizations, doctrines, procedures and automated systems. Historically, the system has been separated into two management levels: wholesale, which typically includes Army Materiel Command (AMC), Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), and the industrial base; and retail, which includes all customer organizations at theater and below. Doctrinally, however, the system is segregated into three levels: strategic, operational, and tactical. In recent years, decisions have been made to enable these domains using commercial standard software whenever appropriate. This paper describes an architectural planning approach for designing a standard software solution that combines the two management levels of Army logistics.

Thomas R. Gulledge, Greg Huntington, Wael Hafez, Georg Simon

ARIS in Cross-Border E-Government — Integrated Automation of Public Services for the InfoCitizen

Summary

The enlargement of the European Union will lead to higher cross-national mobility amongst European citizens. This will make public administration interaction across Europe more complicated. To ensure that this interaction does not become a barrier to citizens, European public administrations need to support E-Government in an information, communication and transaction stage, but above all in an integration stage. The interactions of processes from public services need to be integrated in an interoperable infrastructure. Such a solution was developed in the EU project “Info Citizen” on a conceptual and technical level based on ARIS. The solution was proven to be working in a scenario simulating a real curriculum vitae of a mobile European citizen.

Otmar Adam, Dirk Werth, Fabrice Zangl

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