Process Management

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.

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.

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.

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.

Currently next to the minimization of the production costs the R&D-costs are coming to the fore. This is not just because the share of the R&D-costs in the product costs increases constantly, but also because in a lot of cases the R&D-resources run short and thus become the bottleneck of innovation. The lean innovation approach is concerning all the company’s product-related innovation activities targeting at the maximization of the net benefit of R&D. This article demonstrates the 5-step-realization of lean innovation in companies.

The article gives an overview about the results of the “Automotive Survey 2005” which was commissioned by IDS Scheer Germany and carried out by the Institute for Information Systems (IWi) at the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI). The survey focuses on innovations in the automotive industry, in particular the automotive supplier industry. This article concentrates on business process innovations and their relation to cross-organisational co-operation. The current situation as well as a prospect of its development towards c-business is given at the end of the article.