Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - September 2008 - (Page 42)

“The reason is because if you try to do SOA in a vacuum, you are blindly spending resources to create services without really understanding how frequently they will be used,” she says. “Similarly, if you start modeling processes without understanding what functions and systems those processes use and where services can be reused, you will be doing a lot of extra work.” “We see SOA as enabling the delivery of processes, and the important point here is that it can do it quickly,” says Anand Iyer of i2 Technologies, Dallas. “What we often see today is that a company will decide to change its business model in some way and the delivery mechanism is to go upgrade its ERP system to add functional enhancements,” he says. “By the time that gets done, three years have passed. The need is no longer the same and people have moved on to something else. So the key thing about SOA is that it can deliver processes portive,” says Jeff Varney, BPM practice leader at APQC, Houston, a member-based nonprofit that provides benchmarking and best-practice research. Metastorm BPMS has the capability to model and simulate a process, integrate systems involved in that process with a common user interface, automate the process and then report on the process,” says Mooney. The flexibility of these tools allows users to define and automate a wide variety of processes across the business, she says. One customer, Blue Rhino, provides an example. A division of Ferrellgas, Blue Rhino, Winston-Salem, N.C., is the leading national provider of branded propane cylinders that are made available for exchange at more than 42,000 retail locations in the continental U.S. and Puerto Rico. “We have millions of cylinders that we need to track company-wide so that we can order and transfer inventory between our “We really look at the Metastorm tools as a glue that brings all of our other enterprise systems together.” — Tamria Zertuche of Blue Rhino with the speed at which businesses change.” i2’s Agile Business Process Platform is SOA-based. Working with supply chain technology vendors that have incorporated SOA and process management as part of their offering is one avenue to BPM adoption. Another is through upgrades of enterprise resource planning systems like SAP and Oracle, says Nari Viswanathan, supply chain research director at Aberdeen. “The strategy that ERP providers are adopting is that when companies upgrade, they will automatically get an embedded BPM solution,” he says. A third way is through standalone BPM suites. Which of these a company chooses may depend on how committed the enterprise as a whole is to process management. “BPM suites can be very complicated to set up, but when a company gets to the point where it really wants to manage its business by processes, these tools can be very supdistributors,” says Tamria Zertuche, senior director of IT at Blue Rhino. Visibility also is needed to the status of each tank, whether empty or full. Previously this had been accomplished fairly efficiently, but the process was “pretty much paper based,” Zertuche says. “And, while we weren’t losing tanks, we really didn’t know at any given time how fluidly we could move tanks from one location to another.” With Metastorm, Blue Rhino automated more than 10 processes. One enables distributors to report on month-end inventory counts. These are totaled and compared with master inventory records. Another process enables distributors to order cylinders and cages using a simple graphical interface. Blue Rhino “used canned business flows that come with the Metastorm product and tweaked them a little so they would look like our processes,” says Zertuche. “There was very little customization involved.” Blue Rhino has always been process- centric but Metastorm is the first suite of tools it has used “that does everything from A to B,” she says. “We really look at the Metastorm tools as a glue that brings all of our other enterprise systems together.” Blue Rhino also has used Metastorm to model and execute processes for IT change control, customer care and human resources. It originally purchased the suite to help it comply with Sarbanes-Oxley requirements and this remains a key use. “The self-documentation that occurs while using the tool enabled us to decrease the number of days that our audit teams are on site, because we don’t have to prepare or do any additional work to get internal documentation ready for our IT or financial audit teams,” she says. Ahold, a grocery company based in the Netherlands, uses a BPMS solution from webMethods, now Software AG , to create an unattended replenishment system for more than 700 Albert Heijn grocery stores. It’s process-driven replenishment program feeds real-time, point-of-sale data to its suppliers, which are responsible for their stock positions in the store. “Our philosophy is that if you can be responsive enough and close enough to what your customer does, and if you reduce lead times from nine hours to 18 hours, as we have done, then you have a much better model,” said Peter Van Kralingen, vice president of information management at Ahold, in a speech to the 2007 webMethods user conference. Ahold’s improved processes lowered costs enough to enable Ahold to significantly reduce prices to customers, he said. As a result sales increased and the company outperformed its Dutch competition and gained market share. WebMethods now comprises the core part of Software AG’s BPM suite, which begins with process modeling and simulation. “Simulation allows you to build scenarios around the process model to see how it will operate in the real world before it goes live,” says Lees. The suite’s back-end infrastructure executes the work flow rules. “This environment includes communications with the different back end systems that might be involved in process steps, as well as sending out tasks to individuals and presenting them with user interfaces to collect or view information.” An important benefit of BPM is that the process that is executed is the exact same process that is built with the modeling tool, 42 SEPTEMBER 2008

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Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - August 2008 Contents Editorial GL&SCS Exclusive Fast Forward Up Front Cover Story: Free The Enterprise: Busting Silos in the Supply Chain Business Process Management Merits New Look fromCorporate Strategists Ships and Ports Explore Many Ways to Go Green The Right Information Should Help Avoid Any Kind of Risk Industry Voices

Global Logistics and Supply Chain Strategies - September 2008

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