Process Management

Changes within organisations and processes define the current processing landscapes of industrial companies. A permanent orientation to competitiveness, the aspiration to effectivity and efficiency as well as the continuous progress in technologies and systems, necessitates an overall coordination of relevant processes. Quite obviously this means today no longer to focus only on production and assembly processes. Only the exact interaction of involved areas - besides production/assembly even areas as logistics, quality and process planning - make a production economically ideal. A leading aircraft-producer realizes significant production-changes by modifying the static (dock-)manufacturing system into a trend-setting flow line-concept.

As a consequence of the increasing globalization many industrial companies see themselves forced to secure their competitive ability by an internationalization of their production locations. This requires a long-term planning of the future product structures and process chains, in order to control the variant variety and to protect the core competences. Objectives of the described method are a generation of variants close to the market and a bundling of the core competences.

The technical change management poses a particular challenge for the components supplier industry, due to this industry needs to consider a number of internal as well as OEMs’ external requirements concerning the underlying process. Thus a multitude of process sequences develop, which complicate standardisation and computer support. The following article describes a pragmatic method of resolution, which was conceptually designed and implemented within a project of the company KEIPER GmbH & Co. KG and the Chair of Information Technology in Mechanical Engineering (ITM) at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum.

The Bologna process requires all European universities to establish a bachelor-master system for their curricula. For the theory-laden Diplom curriculum of the German technical universities this restructuring poses problems as well as it provides chances for a renewal of their worldwide respected engineering education. acatech has analysed the current situation together with universities and industry organisations. While acatech recommends keeping the master as the paramount goal of universitary education, our analysis also shows how the often neglected soft and language skills can be integrated into the new standard curricula, thus increasing transparency and internationality.

To cope with the hard global competition in shipbuilding and to secure a high volume of orders for German shipyards there is a need for strengthening research and development in shipyards. An economic development of ships needs a quick and distinct identification of product data as well as a high efficiency of the processes which are linked with these data. To achieve these demands an integration of a product data model and of a process model is necessary witch is described in this paper.

Control of dynamics and complexity of logistic systems will continue to gain in importance in the future. One possibility to cope with this challenge is the concept of autonomous logistic processes. This article addresses the issue of requirements to a method for modelling autonomous logistic processes as well as the development of the method. It gives an overview of the created modelling and view concepts.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) is an approach to improve system interoperability in a business process oriented fashion. The described empirical research study examines the impact of the general organizational understanding, the manner of implementation and deployment of EAI projects on the enterprise architecture. The article illustrates the results and introduces some advice how to improve the recognized issues of the EAI situation in real life context.

The management of inter-organisational business processes is a crucial and necessary factor towards the economic success of an enterprise. Flexibility and manageability of processes are core requirements to interoperability. In the article, we discuss the two complementary paradigms of the service-oriented approach and of the process-oriented approach. We demonstrate how the combination of these two concepts can be used to realize flexible and manageable processes even in a cross-enterprise scenario. The main advantage of this approach is the ability to compose business processes in a flexible way without losing the instruments of an effective business process management.

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.

Standardized information on clients, staff, suppliers and products that is processed in the company`s systems and can be consulted at any moment are the capital of each company. The data must always be kept up-to-date: to make strategical decisions, to overlook supply chains and to offer the best customer service. Companies cannot accept global challenges without running an efficient Masta Data Management system.