business process management

RPA refers to bots that automate repetitive, rulebased tasks in a business process. This paper describes general areas of application for RPA in logistics as well as two practical logistics examples. In addition, a procedure model for the implementation of RPA in logistics is presented. The paper answers the following questions: What are suitable use cases for RPA in logistics? What criteria support the selection of suitable processes? And how should an implementation guide be designed to systematically support an implementation project taking into account critical success factors?

This article describes an opportunity to model actors and systems in various business processes into an overall model by using the technique of networking. To achieve this goal, an algorithm is introduced. Next, different metrics based on social network analysis, are described. These metrics are able to expose parts of the network which have a huge utilization and therefore the underlying process itself. With this technique it is possible for project leaders, managers and decision makers to analyze the processes for flaws, finding out capacities and to build new project teams together (staffing).

Business process management (BPM) as a process-oriented approach to management has to implement and control the change process within an organisation from function- to process-orientation regarding organisational, personal and technological aspects. Furthermore BPM offers software-support to plan, control and supervise process performance and comprehensive cooperation of business processes.

Optimized and efficient business processes are increasingly understood to be the key elements of competitive enterprises. The so far separated functionalities of modelling, execution, integration and analysis of business processes undergo currently a strong trend of convergence - this will lead to a new product type. These new systems will enable companies to put their business process model into the centre of their IT-landscape, to manage them process-centrically and to perform a successive transition to the Real-Time Enterprise due to the consideration of process data within the process model.

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.

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 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.

Business processes play an important role for companies these days. No Manager can ignore potentials resulting of the optimisation of these processes. Therefore it is usual to use software tools to collect, visualise and analyse the business structures. The present investigation enabled an overview at actual purchasable systems.