From Workflow to Worknet: Innovation in Business Process Management
Jürgen Scharpf, Daimler AG
Stefan Brantschen, Whitestein Technologies AG
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Abstract
In the automotive industry, Engineering Change Management (ECM) is of crucial importance for product development and engineering. New car models evolve from existing ones, and also the increasing use of template-based engineering and of common platforms and kits across product lines calls for a stable and well-controlled change management process.
On the other hand, car manufacturers are facing changes and new challenges, triggered by market trends, customer requirements, innovation, social environment, regulations, and new technologies. Hence, business processes such as ECM must be easy to adapt, which requires agile processes, with the ability to autonomously adapt to changing conditions and business contexts. At the same time, the corresponding process definitions must become easy to maintain and change, in order to swiftly reflect changing business and cooperation models.
To cope with this challenge, Whitestein Technologies and Daimler have jointly conceived and developed a novel type of business process management approach and system. The business goals become part of the process definition, and the process engine dynamically determines the required activities of the involved people and committees to achieve these goals depending on the prevailing business context conditions in an optimal way.
As a result, in lieu of strictly following rigid workflows – and work around them ad hoc in exceptional cases! --, the system allows to flexibly navigate on a "worknet" in an agile fashion, guiding the users to achieve their business goals.
In a first part, this presentation introduces the key concepts of the innovative approach to business process management, while the second part reports on its application for Daimler's Agile Change Management system. A concluding outlook outlines the planned innovation steps on the road-map.
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Presentation
PDF Dokument, size, 0,8 MB
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German version
