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In-Depth Information
the activities of frontline workers and has the ability to coordinate the assignment and tracking of
work that organizations can become effective.
Thus, MBC not only recognizes inherently the significance of various process-related tech-
niques and methodologies such as Process Innovation (PI), Business Process Improvement (BPI),
Business Process Redesign (BPRD), Business Process Re-Engineering (BPR), and Business Process
Management (BPM) but also treats them as fundamental, continuous, and integral functions of
the management of a company itself. A collaborative enterprise enabled by the implementation
of a CRM is inherently amenable to business process improvement, which is also the essence of
any Total Quality Management (TQM)-oriented effort undertaken within an enterprise. We
will deal with such process improvement related issues in Chapter 7 “SAP CRM and Enterprise
Business Process Re-Engineering.”
1.3.4 The Value-Add Driven Enterprise
Business processes can be seen as the very basis of the value addition within an organization that
was traditionally attributed to various functions or divisions in an organization. As organizational
and environmental conditions become more complex, globalized, and competitive, processes pro-
vide a framework for dealing effectively with the issues of performance improvement, capability
development, and adaptation to the changing environment.
Along a value stream (i.e., a business process), the analysis of the absence or creation of added
value or (worse) destruction of value critically determines the necessity and effectiveness of a pro-
cess step. The understanding of value-adding and non-value-adding processes (or process steps) is a
significant factor in the analysis, design, benchmarking, and optimization of business processes in
companies leading to BPR. As will be discussed in Chapter 7 “SAP CRM and Enterprise Business
Process Re-Engineering,” SAP CRM provides an environment for analyzing and optimizing busi-
ness processes.
Values are characterized by both value determinants such as time (cycle time and so on), flex-
ibility (options, customization, composition, and so on), responsiveness (lead time, number of
hand-offs, and so on), quality (rework, rejects, yield, and so on), and price (discounts, rebates, cou-
pons, incentives, and so on). We must hasten to add that we are not disregarding cost (materials,
labor, overhead, and so forth) as a value determinant. However, the effect of cost is truly a result of
a host of value determinants such as time, flexibility, responsiveness, and so on.
Consequently, in this formulation, one can understand completely the company's competi-
tive gap in the market in terms of such process-based, customer-expected value and the value
delivered by the enterprise's processes for the concerned product or service. We will refer to such
customer-defined characteristics of value as Critical Value Determinants (CVDs). Therefore, we
can perform market segmentation for a particular (group of ) product or service in terms of the
most significant of the customer values and the corresponding CVDs.
1.3.5 Enterprise Change Management
Strategic planning exercises can be understood readily in terms of devising strategies for improv-
ing on these process-oriented CVDs based on the competitive benchmarking of these values. The
strategies resulting from analysis, design, and optimization of especially the customer-facing pro-
cesses would in turn result in a focus on the redesign of all relevant business process at all levels.
This could result in the modification or deletion of the concerned processes or even the creation
of new process.
