AllenWeb
AllenWeb
Managers at successful enterprises increasingly believe that success is tightly bound to the ability to adopt and exploit practices that drive continuous improvement. Such companies are characterized by a no-holds barred commitment to business-process innovation. Along with today's enterprise resources planning (ERP) releases, new process modeling techniques provide the means to sustain continuous innovation.
Companies now look to implement processes that directly address critical business needs, recognize th cross-organizational nature of the activity, and integrate with existing or planned applications. Given that most ERP suppliers can address best-practice availability and integration requirements at some level, the issue becomes this: How do enterprises achieve competitive, process-based differentiation or advantage?
Understanding - and more effectively managing - the relationship among companies as they exist in a chain of supply and demand has become a driving management imperative. But the widespread achievement of this goal has been inhibited by the lack of technology sophisticated enough to deliver the desired cross-enterprise functionality, coupled with a recognition that implementation is possible only in concert with like-minded supply-chain partners. Some find that a critical new means to address this supply-chain binding centers around the use of business and process modeling technologies and the manner in which those process models interact and support the rapid deployment and enhancement of cross-enterprise production applications.
One of the key value-added technologies in this approach is business-process modeling and the development of industry-based templates - or reference models of best practices. Moreover, this modeling capability needs to be inherently dynamic in nature. That means it must be able to:
Each of the leading ERP suppliers is moving to address these requirements, with The Baan Co. and SAP AG offering the most-mature entries. Oracle Corp. and PeopleSoft, however, are in aggressive pursuit.
In addition to the process modeling technologies being brought to bear on process innovation and ERP implementations, systems suppliers also seek to integrate project management and modeling technology. These methodologies are extensive, market-proven, and often used as the basis for suppliers' rapid implementation claims.
The representative methodologies are Baan's Target Enterprise, Oracle's AIM, PeopleSoft's Select, and SAP's Accelerated SAP. The integration of methodology with technology supports the mid-market initiatives of these ERP system suppliers, placing best practice processes - previously available only to large companies - in the hands of many.
Directly linking business-process modeling tools with underlying ERP systems means that organizations can now drive their businesses based on an understanding of industry best practice and their own unique business requirements rather than constraining business processes by the underlying technology. Given these abilities, the focus of managers, business analysts, and even system implementors can be addressed from the perspective of the business imperative rather than the technologically possible.
Advanced modeling encompasses best practices and processes, the technological intricacies of configuring system parameters and data models, and highly complex product implementation and deployment issues. Technological differentiation starts with attaining true cross-functional, business-processes integration. Increasingly, the differences between ERP suppliers will directly appear as the vendors attempt to address the most demanding cross-enterprise objective - innovation.
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