Chapter 5: building and changing global business processes – Flashcards

Radical process redesign. Also called business process reengineering (BPR) or simply reengineering. Incremental, continuous process improvement. Includes total quality management (TQM), also called quality management and Six Sigma.

Workers often react favorably to incremental change. Gain control and ownership of improvements. Render change less threatening.

Appropriate for addressing cross-functional processes. Helps attain aggressive improvement goals. The goal is to make a rapid, breakthrough impact on key metrics Used only when major change is needed in a short time.

A series of connected tasks and activities done by people and computers to form a business process. Workflow includes software products that document and automate processes. Workflow software facilitates the design of business processes and creates a digital workflow diagram.

Business process management systems; are a way to build, execute, and monitor automated processes that span organizational boundaries.

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), and Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) systems

Oracle, SAP, and Salesforce.com

Supply chain management (SCM) systems manage the integrated supply chain. Processes are linked across companies; a companion process at a company's customer or supplier creates an integrated supply chain.

The coordination, integration, and automation of critical business processes between partners.

PLM systems automate the PLM steps starting with the idea for a product and ending with the "end-of-life" of a product. Includes the innovation activities, new product development and management, design, and product compliance.

All modules easily communicate together with efficiency. Useful tools for effectively centralizing operations and decision making. Reinforce the use of standard procedures across different locations. Redundant data entry and duplicate data may be eliminated. Standards for numbering, naming, and coding enforced. Data and records can be cleaned up through standardization.

Implementation requires an enormous amount of work. Requires redesigning business processes to achieve optimal performance of the integrated modules. Organizations are expected to conform to the approach used in the enterprise system (e.g., change organization structure, tasks). A hefty price tag: additional costs for project management, user training, and IT support. Sold as a suite rather than individual modules.

it is just starting out and processes do not yet exist. operational business processes are not a source of competitive advantage. current systems are in crisis and there is not enough time, resources, or knowledge in the firm to fix them

changing processes that are relied upon for strategic advantage. the features of available packages do not fit the needs of the business. there is a lack of top management support.

Deciding what to share, how to share it, and what to do with it when the sharing takes place. Agreeing on security and encryption or other measures to protect data integrity and ensure that only authorized parties have access. The complexity of the integration can be reduced by insisting on standards—either at the industry level or at the system level.