Attempt all the problems.

Section-A

problem1) What are the three streams of 21st century organization? How will you foresee the interplay of these streams in future organizations?

problem2) (a) Enterprise resource planning (ERP), gives integrated business software modules to support functional areas of any company.

(b) Name well known names of ERP companies in the world and describe how software modules are implemented in any manufacturing company.

problem3) Hammer & Stanton have said that “BPR brings about dramatic changes in management”. Search out definition of BPR and describe each phrase of this definition.

problem4) How BPR is implemented in any company of corporate world

Section-B

CASE STUDY

Are Indian companies ready for Business process Management?

During re-engineering wave, many companies invested heavily in it. In many such cases, what was supposed to be a 90 day initiative took more than two years to complete. Many of this initiative made companies that took them up, anemic.

At that time, many successful re-engineering efforts improved concerned business to better state. In many cases with late adapters of re-engineering change in needs came even before re-engineering process was through. Though, more than 80 percent of BPR efforts failed.

As business needs changed faster than ever, companies needed to adapt and change before they realised their return on investment (ROI). These modifications were triggered by factors like shrinking business cycles, commoditisation of products and services, cost pressures. Knowledge-based services, e-business, globalisation, consolidation, extended value-chains, extended enterprises and external stakeholders.

To cope with these challenges. Businesses kept trying every means to optimise processes, implement automation and run radical management theories, as increasing costs put businesses at risk. This led to the tidal wave of change that saw down-sizing, right-sizing, outsourcing and restructuring.

The need to move on

Inability to meet these changes could constrain a business. Businesses often miss out on new opportunities as changing business processes are often time-consuming and expensive.

New strategic drivers are difficult to consolidate with existing business processes. Frequently, small changes needed for continuous process improvement that could be incorporated at ease, in an agile enterprise, are deferred as of the dreaded impact on existing processes. Hence, changes are compounded, resulting in the monstrous modify effort.

Organisations often face crisis where entities and business processes are not all aligned with company's goals. In many cases it becomes difficult to minimize time-to-market, as of the absence of agile processes.

With lessons learnt, ERP and a lot of other IT systems catering to more or less standardised business, needs with little customisation are being implemented. (Such as: SCM, SRM Web-enabled services, e-procurernent, and CRM. Moreover, many business-specific custom IT solutions were developed from scratch and implemented.

The automation trend was mostly driven by business-function owners with IT requirement going ahead and implementing an IT solution aligned specifically to the process. This led to many disparate systems existing in the organisation under one umbrella. These systems were tightly coupled and in most cases, people were trained and business processes were aligned as per the existing system.

System owners have been data-centric as opposed to process-centric. So when the requirement of process change or collaboration came about, most legacy and modern systems failed to deliver. A gap between process and systems surfaced. The traditional approach of system implementation will definitely give a short-term solution with tightly coupled integration, but the perennial problem of change still persists

This fuelled a shift from a functional mindset to process-oriented thinking. A business process, by nature, is cross-functional, constantly changing, integrated, and interacts with systems and people. This is where BPM comes in.

Advent of BPM

BPM encompasses whole organisation integrating critical processes within and outside the organisation. It is often desired that whole organization behave as system. Earlier, there were technical limitations in achieving this. Though, powered by a strong mathematical foundation, BPM now promises to deliver a single window, from where strategies could be translated into action across business processes.

BPM is not another form of automation or a revolutionary new philosophy. It helps discover what we do and then manages lifecycle of improvement and optimisation in a way which directly translates into operations.

What BPM brings to the table

• Flexible process collaboration and configuration. Earlier, systems were integrated using EDI tools that have been very system-specific. Now processes could communicate with each other using process semantics.

• Agile course correction. Organisations would be able to adapt to changing business
environments and change course accordingly,

• Re-usability of existing systems. Businesses don’t need to scrap existing IT systems for new applications, hence reducing the cost of migration. With advances in Service Oriented Architecture and XML-based messaging systems, existing systems can be re-used.

• Re-usability of business processes. Till now system functionality was re-used, but from the process perspective we could re-use the business process module depending on the granularity. We could re-use IT systems as well as non-IT processes.

• Integrates the organisation in real-time. With all business processes integrated, the organisation behaves like a system in real-time.

• Simplifies deployment. Eradicates the point-to-point integration and tight coupling that adds to inflexibility

• Plug and play different technology providers. With services now communicating in open standards, different technology components could plug into the service model.

• Powering newer strategies. With BPM, business processes would now be able to provide data in real time: it could be fed into business analytics. This would provide a platform for real-time decision-support system. Hence speeding up strategic analysis. The organisation would then be able to align itself to new strategic initiatives at ease.

Case problems :

1) Fuelled  by shift from a functional mindset to process-oriented thinking,  a business process, by nature, is cross functional, constantly changing, integrated and  interacts with system and people. In light of this statement describe Business Process Management.

2) In your own words, describe some of the benefits of Business Process Management.