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).