Autor: Wolfgang Kersten

The increasing complexity in products, structures and processes causes a creeping reduction of the efficiency of intra- and inter-organisational business pro-cesses. Since not all parts of complexity can be influenced by the managerial work, the controlling of the other parts by efficient processes is an important aspect. Business process modularisation allows identifying process parts with clearly defined interfaces, which mainly reduce the complexity of these pro-cesses.

Collaborative Engineering offers companies new possibilities to involve their suppliers into the product development process. The requirements which a successful approach for internet-supported supplier integration has to fulfil are exemplified for the ship building industry. Flexibility and low implementation effort of the chosen solution turn out to be, together with appropriate functionalities to support the distributed cooperation, decisive success factors.