Rainer A. Sommer

Business process management: public sector implications

Business process management has received much attention in the industrial engineering and management literature, and its benefits are well known. Much less has been written in the public sector management literature, and what has been written has been very general. Hence, there is confusion among public managers about how business process management concepts should be implemented. How should public organizations reorganize to accommodate business process management? How are existing or new enterprise systems aligned with business process management methodologies? This paper addresses these issues, and concludes that public organizations will have to change their organizational structures radically as well as their enterprise systems in order to implement business process management concepts successfully. The paper also discusses the benefits of public sector process management, and focuses in some detail on two of the reasons that public organizations have incentive to implement business process management methodologies.

Business process flexibility: a driver for outsourcing

Many organizations have implemented business process management solutions that are enabled by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. More recently, organizations have focused their strategies on the additional benefits that are realizable by augmenting ERP with customer and supplier extensions. This paper focuses on the process integration issues that must be addressed when linking customers and suppliers to back‐office systems. Our hypothesis is that flexible process management, as required by modern customer/supplier relationships, are too costly to implement via traditional ERP solutions. Given that modern competitive advantage is measured in terms of business process flexibility, managers are faced with the daunting prospect of changing ERP configurations on a continuous basis. Such rapid process change requirements are beyond the financial capabilities of most companies, who prefer to leave a well‐tested configuration unchanged. How then are companies managing to deploy fast‐paced process change to support their new e‐business models? This paper describes the strategies that are being used to provide and maintain flexible eBusiness solutions.

Public sector enterprise resource planning

The management of the US Department of Defense (DoD) enterprise must change. Years of under‐funding have led to a wide gap between enterprise support requirements and resources. Private sector firms have faced similar choices. This paper shows how the public enterprise can be changed. Our hypothesis is that private sector implementations of standard software will lead to increased effectiveness and efficiency in public sector organizations. Sufficient detail is provided on how to transition to a modern integrated public sector enterprise, and the steps for implementing such a project are outlined, following standard private sector implementation practices. To explain the problem and solution, the DoD installation management enterprise is used as an example.

Small and medium sized enterprises: no longer just coping with the supply chain

It was not too long ago that the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) were precluded from participating in the lucrative supply-chain transactions generated by much larger manufacturers and suppliers. In most cases, SMEs were unable, or unwilling, to spend the necessary capital for transactional system implementations, or infrastructure upgrades. SMEs were at the mercy of their large customers who dictated the transactional standards and technology interface requirements. As a result, many companies lost lucrative contracts due to their inability to meet these mandates, or they lost revenue in order to maintain a business relationship with a large customer. This research looks at the history as well as at some of the changes that have taken place in the relationship between SMEs and their supply-chain partners. Case study data was collected from SMEs participating in a large, multi-tiered supply chain.

Architecting cross-functional business processes: new views on traditional business process reengineering

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) methods have changed significantly over the last two decades. In todays business environment, competitive advantage (CA) is driven by cross-functional process architectures that can quickly respond to changing customer/supplier needs. Designing such a high degree of process flexibility into a modern corporate environment requires new tools, strategies and methods. This research paper shows that CA can be achieved by developing a process-centric organisational awareness and that process flexibility can be institutionalised through the organisational planning cycle.

Comparison and evaluation of business process modelling and management tools

Business Process Modelling (BPM) and management are becoming an essential part of todays enterprises. This paper compares and evaluates several BPM tools against the criteria that are critical to an enterprises business process optimisation, and its adoption of emerging technologies and methodologies – including Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Enterprise Architectures (EAs).

An introduction to basic enterprise resource planning concepts

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have dominated the large-scale business implementation landscape for over a decade. To that end, this research paper addresses some common misconceptions and planning difficulties encountered when such a system must eventually meet head-on with corporate values, culture and strategic initiatives. Although an ERP system is quite useful in integrating business processes within a common information technology platform, it does not provide much help in linking organisational strategic planning initiatives and objective measurement to the integrated processes that are implied by the software.

Public sector enterprise system implementation

Much has been written about Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for private sector Enterprise System implementation success. Our focus is on CSFs for public sector enterprise software implementations, and our research concludes that differences exist between CSFs in Private and Public Sector enterprise software implementations. These differences are described in this paper. Private sector CSFs apply to the public sector, but additional factors apply uniquely to the public sector. Our primary conclusion is that public sector success is more difficult to achieve, and that government acquisition rules must be revised to align with the CSFs.

Integrating e-business transactions across extended enterprises

International e-business, with the exception of international finance, is still in its infancy. Connectivity is quite common via such mechanisms as the internet and private networks, but application-to-application integration at the business process level is not well developed. This paper draws on our current implementation projects and presents a realistic assessment of e-business integration for the present. We extend the assessment by providing a pragmatic forecast for how the e-business integration model will evolve over the next few years.

Contracting for implementation of standard software

Purpose – Traditional contract vehicles do not align well with enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation methodologies. The purpose of this paper is to identify different contract vehicles and how they map to ERP implementation methodologies. Traditional contract vehicles are more process‐oriented than outcome‐focused. Successful standard software implementations are dependent on the outcome. The misalignment of process‐oriented contract vehicles and results‐oriented implementation methodologies leads to many implementation problems with respect to scope creep and ill‐defined interfaces.Design/methodology/approach – The study is based on research from public and private sector contracting documents, interviews and a review of case studies to show that there is a misalignment between contract vehicles, implementation methods and the eventual project plan.Findings – The research concluded that phased or life‐cycle contracting is the best approach when implementing standard (off the shelf) software i...