process orientation

In increasingly competitive markets professional service firms are highly recommended to continuously scrutinize and improve the efficiency of their job execution. Providing content-related high quality services, such as technical or business consulting, the respective sub-processes as well as each single activity have to be coordinated effectively and required information needs to be provided completely and in time. Thereby, requirements of an operation at different sites have to be considered, both at the customer’s and the company’s own premises, concerning various areas and locations. This article is an abstract of the problem, the solution and the project-related findings based on a practical example.

The implementation and adaption of the Toyota Production System during the 90’s of the last century brought a significant change to the organization of production especially in large scale and mass production for example automotive industries. This change is especially evident for the functioning of material supply. Before the organizational change workers in manufacturing and assembly had to manage the supply of materials mostly on their own. Nowadays this function is handled by the logistics department in most cases. The advantage of this reorganization was a stronger concentration of workers on their main tasks. In the beginning the change process in material supply was considered very skeptically. Today most experts are certain that producing industries cannot meet rising market requirements without an efficient logistics department. This fact is especially true for manufacturing and assembly in high wage countries like Germany. Till now the described change process has not yet ...

Integrating products and services to customized hybrid products can help firms to differentiate from their competitors. The essential value proposition of such bundled offerings can comprise usage-based selling (e.g. of machines) combined with guaranteed availability or the operation of customers’ complex production factors such as a complete assembly line. Operational efficiency is no longer sufficient for achieving long term success with hybrid products. Rather it is the way of interaction with customers which provides new opportunities for value creation. In the context of hybrid products the way of creating value for customers changes from a purely transactional view to a relational process. Accordingly, this paper addresses this change from a process-oriented perspective.

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.