process optimisation

Digitalisation stands for efficiency and process optimisation. It is therefore all the more surprising that even larger medium-sized companies often do not yet have a digital solution for their contract management - the foundation of all economic activity. Instead, long email chains, inconsistent documents and unclear responsibilities dominate the processes from drafting to signing a contract.

The following article describes an integrated method to calculate the investment and (cost-) effectiveness of a process optimisation using innovative techniques like RFID. It is based on the research project IdentProLog. Starting with analysing and optimizing processes it‘s possible to evaluate them with a method like activity-based-costing. The detailed information about process-times for each resource will be taken from a material flow simulation. Using this way its possible to create and format data with a high confidential level. Furthermore, it is possible to consider dependencies between technical resources, even in your investment analysis.

Today the developments within the area of mobile business and mobile commerce influence marketing, sales and maintenance of products and services to a high degree. On the other hand mobile technologies offer new possibilities like: personalisation, localisation, interactivity, ubiquity, comfort of transactions and emotionalisation. But how can these new applications of mobile business be supported in order to structure a company’s internal processes in a more effective and efficient way as well as to increase the customers’ acceptance and customer orientation? A promising possibility is the usage of innovative mobile devices and the investment in new technologies, e.g. Augmented Reality, to meet these demands.

In many cases producers of investment goods offer their customers product-related services to enhance the problem solving possibilities of the product. As these service offers are gaining importance for industry, an ever-increasing necessity to optimise service processes, as has been done for production processes in the past, emerges. Experiences so far clearly show that many industrial companies have not yet realised this necessity. Service processes are often provided in a rather unorganised way. Against this background this paper presents a tool to assist industrial efforts to analyse and optimise service processes.