Subject-Oriented Business Processes Meet Strategic Management: Two Case Studies from the Manufacturing Industry

Successful companies use business processes for the transfer of long-term strategies in operational workflows. The modeling approach presented in this chapter shows how strategic objectives of a company can be combined with the S-BPM modeling notation. The new modeling approach is used in two case studies. First, redesign rules for the strategic optimization of workflow models are demonstrated in the case of the customer support processes of an international enterprise. A second case study introduces a company-wide monitoring system through the example of the product development process of a multinational company from Germany. M. Lederer (&) P. Schott Information Systems (Services-Processes-Intelligence), University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Lange Gasse 20, 90403 Nuremberg, Germany e-mail: [email protected] P. Schott e-mail: [email protected] M. Kurz QUA-LiS NRW, Paradieser Weg 64, 59494 Soest, Germany e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2015 A. Fleischmann et al. (eds.), S-BPM in the Wild, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-17542-3_2 13 2.1 Motivation “How beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results”. This statement suggests that strategies need an adequate implementation and measurable results in order to become alive. Successful companies know how to operationalize sustainable strategies, which means to translate long-term goals into daily business (Wolf and Harmon 2012). Business processes are a core way for organizations to operationalize strategic objectives in workflows (Mintzberg 1994). However, studies show that process managers are struggling with making this critical transfer (Minonne and Turner 2012; Sidorova and Isik 2010). The two companies serving as case studies in this chapter were confronted with this problem in two different stages of the BPM lifecycle. The first manufacturing company needed an approach to redesign customer support processes strategically. In the second case, a control system was needed that allows checking whether innovation strategies were implemented in product development processes modeled in S-BPM. These two situations are typical challenges of companies because strategic objectives (e.g., increasing customer satisfaction, minimization of time to market, etc.) are often not systematically taken into account during typical BPM activities (Hörschgen 2001). There are two basic aspects for incorporating strategy in business processes (Petzmann et al. 2007): • First, strategic guidelines need to be incorporated in the process models. This implies that process models need to be designed so that they can implement strategic objectives when they are executed. If, for example, the strategic goal in the first case study is to increase customer satisfaction by fast issue handling, the S-BPM model should include elements (e.g., activities or documents) which are suitable to achieve this goal (e.g., forwarding scenarios and role models if a decision maker is not working fast enough). • Second, once the models are aligned, the achievements of strategic objectives need to be managed in everyday business. That means monitoring and controlling process instances. This way, process owners can check if workflows follow the strategy. In the second example, a suitable control system should answer the question of whether development projects are forcing the strategic objective of increasing technology push innovations. In this context and as well as in the two scenarios, the S-BPM approach focuses on one of the most essential factors for strategy implementation (Outram 2014): humans. Studies show that the consideration of human factors such as communication and understanding (Mair 2002), compliant leadership (Weber and Schäffer 2000) as well as motivation (Richardson 2004) for strategic long-term issues are Winston Churchill, British politician (1874–1965). 14 M. Lederer et al.