Common wisdom has it that the best way to establish consistent business processes across disparate business units is to standardize on a single enterprise-wide ERP software suite.
But Dave Mewes isn't interested in common wisdom. In fact, the vice president and CIO at MasterBrands Cabinets Inc. (Jasper, IN) likes to call his IT strategy an "anti-ERP" plan. After watching his company balloon to five times its original size over three-years, mostly via acquisition, the last thing Mewes wanted to do was attempt to engineer a migration of all of MasterBrands' business units to a single ERP platform.
Although Mewes knew he needed to begin creating common processes across all of MasterBrands' business units, he decided that moving to a single ERP platform wasn't feasible. Not only would the job have been big, it would have been nearly never-ending considering the likelihood that MasterBrands, a unit of Fortune Brands, would continue its acquisition binge. "We don't know the business processes and systems we'll need to work with going forward, so our strategy was to allow for a nimble approach that can incrementally scale and cover operations that may be acquired while still running disparate platforms," he said.
Mewes began to orchestrate new, comprehensive business processes that span multiple business units and systems using business process management (BPM) and enterprise application integration (EAI) software from Vitria Technology Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA). And a year ago, MasterBrands launched One Touch, which gives their customers a single interface and process for placing orders and checking order status.
MasterBrands followed One Touch with a project that gives internal production planners cross-business unit visibility into production, back order and logistics processes and allows them to quickly consolidate shipments. This process has allowed it to significantly cut shipment costs while enabling the company to fill customer orders quicker, Mewes says.
Mewes certainly isn't the first CIO to cope with the fact that ERP and other legacy systems often take on the characteristics of digital concrete, making it difficult for manufacturing companies to quickly reengineer or even tweak business processes in response to changes in the business. Many progressive manufacturers and software vendors have latched onto the notion of service-oriented architectures (SOAs) as a way to improve process agility by breaking monolithic enterprise software applications into smaller, more manageable Web services-enabled components. But, even once ERP suites are decomposed, manufacturers will need to flexibly re-orchestrate the new modules, tying them together so they not only support existing business processes but can also change as the business changes.
That's where BPM tools come in. BPM tools from a rapidly growing list of software vendors fill what has been a gap between the business requirements documentation work typically done by business analysts and line-of-business executives, and the application development and integration work typically done by IT organizations. Working collaboratively, they can design end-to-end business processes, specify rules that determine how the business process will operate, deploy the code that actually runs the new business process and integrates pieces of existing applications and monitor and analyze how well specific business processes are operating.
In addition to a graphical business modeling component, most BPM toolsets include a business process repository, a runtime environment for executing the business process, an application integration engine and a monitoring engine.
The idea of graphically modeling business processes certainly is not new. Software vendors such as IDS Scheer AG (Saarbrucken, Germany), Popkin Software Inc. (New York) and even Microsoft with its Visio tool have long allowed users to create graphical depictions of, and even monitor, their business processes. What is new, and what's driving interest in BPM, experts say, is the emergence of the SOA concept and some new Web services-related standards that promise to make BPM tools much more than just a way to create pretty pictures of business processes.
"Web services standards are driving renewed interest in BPM," says Eric Marks, president and CEO of consulting firm Agile-Path Corp. (Newburyport, MA) and an MA columnist. These include the business process modeling notation (BPMN) language and the business process execution language (BPEL).
Standards Required
BPMN, a creation of the Business Process Management Initiative (BPMI.org), creates a standard way for business processes to be represented graphically. More significantly, BPEL, backed by IBM, Microsoft and others, creates a standard way for business process models to be automatically translated into executable code used to orchestrate application components with Web services interfaces. The BPEL standard has yet to be finalized, but many vendors already support it in BPM products.
"In the past, there was no way to translate the flexibility and power we saw in business process modeling tools into actual implementations," says Rob Cheng, product marketing director for application servers and tools, Oracle Corp. (Redwood City, CA). Their BPM tool, Oracle BPEL Process Manager, generates BPEL. "What's changed is that these tools now come with an execution environment made possible through SOAs and Web services standards."
The recent rush among vendors to BPEL and the more robust definition of BPM has been dramatic. Oracle and enterprise application integration vendor Tibco Software Inc. (Palo Alto, CA) have both entered the BPM space in the past year through acquisitions, Oracle buying Collaxa Inc. and Tibco buying Staffware plc. Also, a year ago SAP (Walldorf, Germany) entered into a BPM partnership with IDS Scheer. According to Roman Bukary, vice president for XApps and analytics at SAP, an implementation of Scheer's Aris BPM toolset will become part of the composite application framework within SAP's NetWeaver environment. PeopleSoft (Pleasanton, CA), as part of its product partnership with IBM, plans to integrate IBM's Websphere business process modeler and BPEL execution engine with its applications. It's also using IBM's BPM tools for several end-to-end composite applications such as customer profitability management.
As vendors from various domains rush to BPM, progressive manufacturers will have to answer several key questions before deploying it. The first: Where in the IT stack does BPM make the most sense? Does BPM belong as an extension of your enterprise application platform? That's certainly where SAP, Oracle, PeopleSoft, IFS and other ERP providers believe it belongs. But manufacturers also have the option of centering BPM outside of the ERP stack. Infrastructure vendors such as BEA, Vitria and Tibco, for example, are positioning BPM as best aligned with EAI tools where, together, they can orchestrate and integrate application components from many application vendors.
While deciding, manufacturers should consider their information architectures and the scope of the business process to be managed, experts say. "If you're trying to define and manage a horizontal business process like order-to-cash or quote-to-ship, it probably doesn't make sense to tie it to a single application vendor's Web services implementation," says Marks. "But if it's something more contained ... you could probably do that within the context of an application environment."
Similarly, before selecting BPM tools, manufacturers should consider what and whom the business processes will touch. Predictably, many of the BPM tools from ERP and EAI vendors are designed primarily to define and implement business processes that tie business applications together. But what if your company's de facto business processes consist of a combination of interactions between systems and humans executed by e-mail or fax?
While some vendors such as Tibco are beginning to address both system- and human-oriented process with their BPM tools, a different set of BPM vendors is emerging with tools aimed primarily at defining and managing human-oriented business processes and workflows. They include software vendor FileNet Corp. (Costa Mesa, CA), with origins in document management software, as well as some pure-play BPM providers such as MetaStorm Inc. (Columbia, MD). MetaStorm's e-Work business process designer and execution platforms allow companies to define human-based business processes and their participants in terms of their roles in the process and their data needs. It then routes work to each participant according to the defined business process and analyzes how well it's working.
Tetra Holding Inc. (Blacksburg, VA), a maker of fish food and aquarium equipment, has used e-Work to improve and automate its engineering change procedures. According to Charlie Lisanti, an information systems consultant at Tetra, prior to the business process improvement project it took the company a week to move engineering change paperwork through the departments involved in the process. Now Tetra can get the approvals lined up in a day or less.
Next, says Lisanti, Tetra plans to use e-Work to automate the process it uses to conduct lab tests on products that have been returned. "That process used to take a long time because the customer service department would want the test done, and a piece of paper would be dropped down to engineering where it would sit on somebody's desk," says Lisanti. "We want to turn what used to be separate disjointed steps into an integrated, managed process."
Whether they're trying to orchestrate systems- or human-centric business processes, before taking the leap into BPM, managers should be prepared for significant changes in how line-of-business analysts and IT programmers interact. Since it's expected that both sides -- IT and line-of-business -- will end up using the same BPM tools to model, implement and deploy composite applications, it's likely, say experts, that they will find themselves working in much tighter collaboration.
Mewes has already started cross-training IT developers and line-of-business analysts on the same Vitria BPM tools in the hope that many of the communication disconnects that have historically undermined collaboration between the two disciplines will begin to go away.
"They'll have the same skills, and they'll understand the same language about processes," says Mewes. In the end, that may be the real promise of BPM.