The implementation of these principles in recent years has made it possible for Germany and other modern economies to achieve an increase in productivity which – in spite of the high wage costs – has secured their international competitiveness. But the reserves which can be exploited by making corporate structures leaner and consolidating processing are exhausted at some point. That is why – completely within the sense of the continuous improvement process – the search is on for new optimization strategies. Business mashups are a new opportunity which depend on a combination of lean management principles with modern IT: the focus is on the automation of processes in a service-oriented architecture (SOA) and the empowerment of employees within the sense of Web 2.0 flexibility.  

Business process automation assures quality

Business process automation (BPA) is not a revolutionary concept, but rather a technology which has developed and developed further in an evolutionary process. As early as 1996 – ­parallel to research on lean management – the German Institute for Standardization (DIN) examined the state of development in the automation of business processes in its Technical Report 50, “Business Process Modeling and Workflow Management”. Tools and standards were at that time still in their infancy, but, ­driven by the underlying performance growth of the IT platforms, have undergone rapid development. Their maturity is indicated by the flexibility of the solutions available on the market, the throughput and scalability in automation, and the availability of standards and development and process modeling tools.

The core of the BPA applications is a business process engine (BPE), frequently also known as a workflow engine. This application concentrates on the execution of processes. The processes to be executed – a structured sequence of individual activities – must be defined accordingly. The BPE responds to external inputs, permits conditional branching during the course of the process, and generates outputs for other systems or human users. As it moves through the pre-defined workflow, it links human activities with automated activities in the associated ­applications. Business activity monitoring (BAM) functions which permit flexible analysis and quality improvement of all of the executed processes with respect to frequency, cycle time, or error rates are closely linked with the BPE. During the course of the evolution of business process automation, two fundamental standards have developed: the business process modeling ­notation (BPMN) and the business process execution language (BPEL). In the long term, the use of BPMN and BPEL is intended to reduce dependency on manufacturer-specific implementations and facilitate the interchangeability of solutions.