Ex 26. Systems Integration: Business process analysis

Organisations, through their activities, are the producers of their own knowledge (Biazzo, 2000). Business Process Analysis (BPA) examines the current running processes with the aim of identifying them, as well as indicating problems such as bottlenecks, measuring key performance indicators and suggesting improvements (Celino, Karla, de Medeiors, Zeissler, Oppitz, Facca & Zoeller 2003). BPA is the first step in improving efficiency and to effectively manage information collection (McKibben & Pacatte, 2003).

To stay competitive, companies have to be agile in adapting business processes to suit ever-changing market dynamics. The main aim of performing BPA is to integrate both internal and external processes of the organisation into a resource planning system such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) (Turban, Leidner, McLean & Wetherbe, 2006).

ERP retrieves information from a diverse range of data sources such as customer relations management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and partnership relations management (PRM). It is consolidated and stored for one-point-access for querying. Here information can be searched and retrieved by applications such as process mining and reverse engineering (Thacker, Sheth & Patel, 2005).

With web services becoming a common feature in organisational processes of today the systems like ERP may well have seen their day.

What is relevant to my work environment is whether such monolith applications like ERP are becoming inflexible, bloated and expensive. Are there new systems on the horizon which are more attuned to web services and gathering Web knowledge? (McKendrick, 2006)

Some would agree that there are. Such as service oriented architecture (SOA). SOA’s are seen as being flexible, scalable, loosely coupled and encourage reuse rather than the more traditional system architecture in identifying and integrating processes whilst supporting the key element of sharing data (Davis, Studer & Warren, 2006).

Sources:
Biazzo, S. (2000). Approaches to business process analysis: a review. Business Process Management Journal, 6(2), 99-112.
Celino, I., de Medeiros, A., Zeissler, G., Oppitz, M., Facca, F., & Zoeller, S. (2007). Semantic Business Process Analysis. Paper presented at the 3rd European Semantic Web Conference. from http://ftp.informatik.rwth-aachen.de/Publications/CEUR-WS/Vol-251/paper6.pdf
Davis, J., Studer, R., & Warren, P. (2006). Introduction. In J. Davis, R. Studer & P Warren (Eds.), Semantic Web Technologies. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.
McKendrick, J. (2006). AMR: SOA will kill ERP. Service Oriented Architecture. Retrieved 14 May 2009, from http://blogs.zdnet.com/service-oriented/?p=698
McKibben, J., & Pacatte, L. (2003). Business Process Analysis/Modeling for Defining GIS Applications and Uses. Retrieved 13 May 2009, from http://proceedings.esri.com/library/userconf/proc03/p0537.pdf
Thacker, S., Sheth, A., & Patel, S. (2005). Complex Relationships for the Semantic Web. In D. Fensel, J. Hendler, H. Lieberman & W. Wahlster (Eds.), Spinning the Semantic Web (pp. 279-316). Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Turban, E, Leidner, D., McLean, E., & Wetherbe, J. (2006). Information Technology for Management (5th ed.): John Wiley & Sons.

~ by adkitc594 on May 20, 2009.