| BPM Spotlight |
Information technology’s most compelling role in the enterprise is as the foundation for business innovation. Business process management (BPM) enabled by a service-oriented architecture (SOA) supplies the underpinning for the corporate evolution that can advance an organization’s fortune in a hypercompetitive marketplace. Business process automation can contribute the kind of efficiency improvement that drives many new initiatives for mechanizing formerly manual operations. These initiatives also offer entry into more extensive BPM projects because process automation provides the runtime engine to support a comprehensive SOA environment. This engine translates into almost immediate payback by equipping the business with the apparatus to make a company more responsive to market dynamics. Business process automation puts operations in place using a mix of technology and human resources to streamline business activities. BPM enabled by SOA has the unique characteristics that allow companies to leverage existing software investments in order to effectively choreograph disparate applications, people and systems to work together in an automated fashion. The advantages of the resulting business process automation are numerous. Process automation eliminates many error-prone manual procedures that can have expensive consequences for the business. Organizations that leverage automated processes can lower their operating costs, reduce complexity and improve customer response times and overall customer satisfaction. The result is a more flexible business. Process automation also can help organizations meet industry mandates and regulatory requirements, avoiding the large penalties and costs associated with non-compliance. Automation in Action Consider the case of Chinese retailer Yansha. The company faced an opportunity and a corresponding challenge as it became a player in the global economy in the early part of this decade. Competing against more nimble international businesses, the company needed to automate supply chain processes involving 1,800 suppliers in order to streamline operations. Yansha teamed with IBM to build a process-driven supply chain management platform known as Blue Engine, which uses SOA to tie together enterprise resource planning (ERP) and supply chain applications to support automated business processes, including purchase orders, shipping notifications, invoices and payment processing. The payoff of Yansha’s investment is tremendous. The company cut order lead time from days to hours. Yanesha’s order acknowledgement rate soared to 99 percent from 80 percent, while the company slashed its order-error rate to just one percent. The retailer saw a return on its investment in just nine months. Using SOA to support business process automation can open the door to broader BPM implementations that facilitate the responsiveness organizations need to thrive in a downturn. Of course, BPM enabled by SOA delivers benefits above and beyond responsiveness, increasing overall operational efficiency, lowering costs and increasing business agility. The result is a company that will prosper in good times as well as bad; in other words, a company that treats every challenge as a new opportunity. Back to homepage »
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Archive of Articles by Amy Larsen DeCarlo