BPM reference model - fragment 09 - Your flexible BPM system will become an enabler for business innovations

... continued from fragment 08

1.9   Your flexible BPM system will become an enabler for business innovations

A typical task for a BPM system is to balance the final added-value of the product against the overheads associated with restructuring and/or tuning the enterprise business system to create this added-value. Today market success is often based on offering personalised products for less overhead. This book is not about how to make your products better, different or more attractive for the market -- this is for you to decide. What this book can offer is to help you reduce the overheads in doing so -- your flexible BPM system will become an enabler for your business innovations.

Imagine that each product is handled by a personalised and dedicated "virtual" business micro-system. The micro-system is optimised for a particular product and evolves together with the product lifecycle (see figure 1.10). As a result, any exception becomes the norm. Instead of reducing the number of variations and considering exceptions as a loss in productivity ("20 % of the work takes 80 % of the time") all products are treated equally. Of course, this is already the case for the manufacturing of expensive products such as aircrafts, cars and, to some extent, computers, but such an approach is also applicable to a wider range of commodities, especially those treated/handled with software-intensive systems.

Figure 1.10   The co-evolution of the enterprise business system and business micro-systems

... This is the end of the chapter 1. Maybe I will make also publicly available the chapter 13 "The BPM opportunity and challenge for enterprise architecture".

Thanks,
AS