Week 14 - Redesign Supply Chain Processes

Week 14 - Redesign Supply Chain Processes

References:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/webservices/library/ws-rose2/index.html
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1189596


In this lecture, we were taught about the redesign of supply chain processes. A "supply chain" is defined as the flow of materials, information, money and services from raw material suppliers through factories and warehouses to the end customers. Towards the end, we also touched on the concept of Partner Interface Processes. Here, we are mostly concerned with Inter-Organisational Misalignments, which can broadly be categorised in three types:

1. Plug-and-Play E-Process Misalignments
2. Information Coordination Misalignments
3. Knowledge Sharing Misalignments

Plug-and-Play E-Process Misalignments

An e-process is a process where there is an established internet communication link between two computer applications. There exists an e-process misalignment if the interfaces of the applications are different and that the interface dialogue does not trigger the correct process sequence at the business level. This causes problems and hinders the effectiveness of the process.

Information Coordination Misalignments

This happens when the information from two related sources contain mis-matches. These misalignments are caused by non-automated or non-standard interfaces at the sources, resulting in difficulties in synchronising information. Therefore the supply chain process is delayed and the inventory level is raised and process time is lengthened.

Knowledge Sharing Misalignments

"Knowledge sharing" among enterprises in a supply chain means the sharing of:

• Market knowledge and trends
• Knowledge for joint market programmes
• expertise around product and service design
• Collaborative demand forecasting

When there are misalignments:

• they hinder the intelligent management of knowledge around supply chain processes
• they limit the management's ability to improve performance of the supply chain
• they require more qualitative information than normal transactional information

Partner Interface Processes (PIPs)

A PIP is a process in which standard protocols are shared between enterprises for standardisation purposes in order to reduce misalignments.

There are two types of PIPs, open PIPs or closed PIPs. With open PIPs, standards are shared across an industry with reusable designs; whereas closed PIPs have standards that are shared between a number of partners.

Rosetta Net is an example of PIPs.

Week 13 - Process Redesign (3) and Implementation

Week 13 - Process Redesign (3) and Implementation

References:
http://projectmanagement.ittoolbox.com/documents/successful-bpr-implementation-strategy-13101
http://www.bus.iastate.edu/nilakant/MIS538/Readings/Integrating%20BPR%20with%20ISD.pdf

This week we picked up process redesign from where we left off last time at the workflow software supported process transformation stage. We have now finished the last step of the process redesign phase which is the Planning Process Integration step. We also covered the next phase after Process Redesign, Implementation and Organisational Transformation.

In this step, we investigated the options for IT integration for BPR. Starting from 1990, primitive custom applications were developed to support the growing demand of e-business. These IT platforms have since come a long way in their evolution to the state-of-the-art XML-based Process Integration Suites that they are today. In between the two ends of the evolution, they have gone through the stages of being simple workflow engines, integrated enterprise applications and specialised e-process automation software. Let's have a look at each of those stages.

Custom Application Development

A stage where custom developed applications were starting to be integrated into IT architectures. Customisation is still common presently as a result of the growing IT differences propagated by the legacy systems between organisations.

Nowadays however, the trend has been to emphasise core functionality of systems rather than integration.

The Workflow Engine Operation

A business process model is generated by software, where all information, databases, activities, authorisation, data routing are maintained to facilitate automated business process execution.

Enterprise Application Integration (EAI)

This was where Business-to-Business software was used to manage the process flow and interactions across supply chain partners. Using EAI effectively had the advantage of integrating without having to make major changes to the current infrastructure. It created an ordered framework to an organisation as it served as the central coordinator between different business stations.

Note that EAI was differed from middleware in that it focused on the integration of both business-level processes and data as opposed to just data. EAI included reusing as well as distributing business processes and data. EAI also allowed integration of applications that did not understand each other.

Specialised E-Process Automation Software

The different departments within an enterprise were all connected by an intranet network, which was itself connected to the supplier portal and logistics through Internet network. This meant that all employees of the enterprise could order supplies directly online and keep track of payments.

XML-based Process Integration Suites for E-Business

This is the latest incarnation of IT integration technology. XML marks up a document with user-defined tags which enables simple organisation of data in computer or human readable formats and improved communications between different customised applications or enterprises.

Apart from that, XML has the capability to make plug-and-play seamless connectivity between processes of various enterprises.

We finished the Redesign Phase here and moved onto the next phase of BPR.

Implementation of Organisational Transformation - Change Management

The concept of change management is really a structured approach from current to desired state, while avoiding the inevitable user resistance to changes. This phase is mainly concerned with the people's side of issues and the goal is to use structured techniques to transition through the changes. Most of those techniques are based on Lewin's theory of unfreezing, changing and refreezing.

Unfreezing - Managers move employees from their comfort zones to the next stage

Changing - Transition time needed depends on the extent of change required

Refreezing - Stability at the desired state may be temporary since business typically involves rapid changes

HR Problems

• Fear and anxiety
• Resistance to changes
• Hard to work properly while undergoing changes
• Perceived erosion of human capital
• Employees like to keep their old skills and think of changing as a disposal of their old skills

Remedial Actions

• Establish sense of urgency
• Form powerful guiding coalition
• Create and communicate vision
• Empower others to act on vision
• Plan for and create short-term wins
• Consolidate improvements and produce more changes
• Institutionalise new approaches