Business process

Within the larger system, research and especially development processes have become business processes, with teams from marketing, manufacturing, and finance participating from the start (8). In some companies, the R D function is so highly integrated with the business that formal R D organizations have vanished many corporate laboratories have been reduced or disbanded, with the researchers moved into separate business divisions (9,10). 

Business Business Cross-Functional Customer Administrative Business Process... 

Design the quality system from the top down by analyzing your business processes and then implement from the bottom up, starting with customer complaints. 

TQM calls on project teams to analyze business processes in terms of customer satisfaction, and begins with an understanding of who the customers are and who is responsible for meeting their expectations. In relatively simple processes (such as the electronic mail example), the customer-supplier relationship is fairly clearcut. In more complex processes that affect many people in different ways, there may be multiple customer and supplier categories, each requiring its own analysis. TQM untangles these processes by identifying the subprocesses, activities, and customer-supplier relationships they comprise. 

Defining Process Barriers. If a business process does not exist or simply doesn t work, the redesign team needs to know why. In some cases, the reason maybe simply that no one recognized the need for a given system similarly, a system may remain "broken" because no one realized it needed fixing, or knew how to go about it. In others, the team may... 

A key advantage of the business process redesign approach is that while it draws on past experience (in the form of the team s collective expertise) it is not bound by it. This helps minimize the risk that inadequate practices may become institutionalized through habit or neglect, and forces the team to take a fresh look at the critical processes under review. At the same time, this approach requires more concentrated effort than either TQM or model programs and may not be necessary in cases where incremental improvement is all that s required to address PSM gaps. 

Edward J. Kane, IBM s quality focus on the business process, Quality Progress, April 1986. 

A We have seen the benefits that redesigning other business processes have brought the company in terms of quicker and more appropriate response to change. I expect to see these same benefits in PSM and ESH. 

A Yes, although our performance is one of the best in the industry, our failure to improve in the last few years is disappointing. However, this is only one of several reasons. We have seen the benefits of ISO 9000 and redesigned business processes in other parts of our business. It is now time to get these benefits into PSM and ESH. We believe that an ability to respond faster to new demands will provide a business advantage. We will be able to permit new facilities faster and respond to new regulations and standards more quickly and at lower cost than our competitors. 

The level of the information flow boils down to a purely technical level where the partners agree on common protocols for transferring data. For the chemical industry, an initiative to set uniform standards is CIDX. CIDX (http //www.cidx.org) is a trade association and standards body whose mission is to improve the ease, speed and cost of conducting business electronically between chemical companies and their trading partners. It provides the Chem eStandards, a collection of defined messages and related business process guidance that companies use to understand the requests and fulfill electronic business orders and related transactions. 

Business Process Reengineering capture the as-is state of a process and derive the desired to-be future status. 

The optimization of value-added processes is a subject that scientists all over the world have been dealing with for more than 70 years. The first basic algorithms for so-called Linear Programming (LP) were developed at American and European universities already in the 1930s, for the first time allowing the planning and simulation of simple business processes. LP soon became the base of the first software systems and even today almost all Supply Chain Management (SCM) or... 

The independence approach allows for a good encapsulation of the APS issue but requires major changes in business processes. It requires the creation and maintenance of an independent data model with its own data structure and the definition of new business processes. Introduction of the APS system must be done in a big bang. Integration is not fully guaranteed, its quality depends on the throughput and the error tolerance of the integration interface. 

The embedding approach may require an improvement of modeling in the ERP system (i.e., to maintain additional detailed information for APS purposes) but it can utilize all established business processes, data models and infrastructures. Introduction of the subordinate planning system can be done step-by-step with minimum impact on established business processes. Integration is fully guaranteed... 

From the point of view of the authors it is advisable not to overemphasize the ideas of optimization and the desire for one-button solutions. A good compromise can be found if the overall production situation can be made transparent just-in-time to the motivated employees and if reasonable business processes have been established. 

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