process innovation

Process innovations should be planned at least just as systematically as product innovations. The process roadmapping is a methodology for illustrating development of processes and process variants in the future. Rising dynamics and increasing complexity let the availability of different process variants appear necessary. Roadmapping supports the procedure of defining process variants.

Process innovation became more and more important for producing enterprises. Under these circumstances effective planning procedures for implementation of innovations are indispensable. The article shows possibilities of acting in this management field. The approach is atuned also for the needs and conditions of SMEs.

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.