Automate
New Business Models with Software AG software solutions
Business case
Picture this … You are the CEO of a corporation that operates in various lines of consumer goods. Your products must compete heavily with similar products from other companies. Your supervisory board has asked you to come up with a strategy for growth. But there just isn’t any money for investments in innovative products, catchy marketing campaigns or strategic acquisitions. The supervisory board suggests going after the competition’s customers.
You think to yourself: “This would only work if I could offer those customers a product faster, in a more convenient way or cheaper than my competitor. So I have to redesign our ordering and distribution process to be better than the others. And, I could offer customers even more value if I joined forces with partners.”
At a meeting with your business unit directors, you discuss the strategy, which generates a lot of ideas. One business unit could enter the market as a new electricity provider without actually producing electricity or having lines or meters. You could be a one-stop vendor of an end-to-end digitized process for your customers: ordering, shipping, billing and customer service. You could buy capacity from energy producers, pay usage fees for lines and residential meters and, in turn, increase their capacity utilization. You would advertise via online marketplaces on the Internet. Digitization would make your offering scalable, cheaper than the competition’s and you would penetrate an upscale segment of the market. Your other business units – Mobile Communications, Landline Communications, Rental Cars, Auto Sales and Travel – are quick to follow.
All your directors have ideas for generating business through partnerships with other organizations. The Electricity unit could market other providers’ green energy; Mobile Communications plans to sell access to music portals in addition to cell phone plans; Auto Sales wants to add insurance and vacation bookings to its portfolio; and Travel could offer travel guides.
Technology
Your company must evaluate its entire operation from a process point of view, regardless of basic IT infrastructure or other limitations. You direct your staff to redesign all processes from receipt of order to receipt of payment based on KPIs. Only after this has happened should the decision about IT support for these new business processes be made. In collaboration with your CIO, you choose webMethods by Software AG. Processes are built and managed using BPMS and governed with BAM. SOA, based on the CentraSite registry/repository, is at the core of this system. CentraSite enables you to structure, scale and accelerate your SOA implementation. This solution includes directives for re-use; it automates SOA management processes, simplifies the complex dependencies between services and manages the complete service lifecycle. CentraSite provides the critical advantage of comprehensive transparency and control over the development and implementation of services. Through user-defined monitoring and enforcement policies, CentraSite ensures that your new SOA implementation meets service-level agreements (SLAs) and performance targets set for your mission-critical applications.
IT terms
business process management; cross-over integration; process innovation outranks product innovation.
Products
webMethods Suite
