business process

The crises of recent years have highlighted the importance of robust business processes. Even if the concept of robustness is often not clearly defined in the context of entrepreneurial activity, it can certainly be defined on the basis of various factors such as agility, adaptability and resilience. A systematic analysis of robustness and its prerequisites in the corporate context is therefore highly relevant, especially in times characterized by uncertainty.

The handling of customer-individual requirements, product variants and a worldwide market requires the professionalization of knowledge-intense processes. Small and Medium sized Enterprises (SME) often have excellent individual competencies, but lack a systematic management of the associated knowledge. IT-solutions for Knowledge Management in SMEs provide limited functionalities and are thus rarely used. Therefore, a need exists for the business process oriented approach for Knowledge Management in SMEs, featured in this article. Implemented in a portal for information management, it supports optimization of knowledge-intense processes.

Due to increasing pressure of competition accompanied with the developments in information technology many companies consider speeding up and improving their business processes with regard to major orientation towards their customers. Employees which are involved in these business processes have to be supported by an improved and tailored information supply. One possibility for this support by new Information Compative Technologies (ITC) will be shown in this article on the basis of an example for a customer complaint process.

Collaborative Business in the common sense addresses the tightly coupled, cooperative interworking between different companies on the business process layer. The capability of full-fledged, realtime collaboration is one of the fundaments for the virtual enterprise. Based upon a cooperation with the SAP AG a methodological framework for the collaborative, automated generation of business processes is being developed in the CoBPIA-project. The major goal can be described as the best possible adaption towards rapidly changing market situations, achieved by the processing of a market request and its automated transformation into a business process. The given approached is highly knowledge driven.

Knowledge as a resource for business value creation became an increased importance during the last years. Industries are mainly influenced, which value creation is basing for the most part on the acquisition, generation and usage of knowledge. Known tools for business process modelling only consider explicit knowledge which is represented in a formal manner. There is no focus on person-related knowledge that is not mainly used for information processing. KMDL allows the modelling and analysis of knowledge intensive business processes like software engineering, mechanical design or technical sales and basing on this the planning of knowledge management systems and their integration into a firm.