Recommending Books for Purchase (Bulletin 62 - May 2020): Business Process Management

This book conceptualises and develops crowdsourcing as an organisational business process. It argues that although for many organisations crowdsourcing still implies an immature one-off endeavour, when developed to a more repeatable business process it can harness innovation and agility. The book offers a process model to guide organisations towards the establishment of business process crowdsourcing (BPC), and empirically showcases and evaluates the model using two current major crowdsourcing projects. In order to consolidate the domain knowledge, the BPC model is turned into a heavyweight ontology capturing the concepts, hierarchical relationships and decision-making relationships necessary to establish crowdsourcing as a business process in an organisation. Lastly, based on the ontology it presents a decision tool that provides advice on making informed decisions about the performance of business process crowdsourcing activities. 

In this book Jan Kopia assesses the problems of the evaluation of integrated management systems. Current scientific research results and its practicality within organizations are presented. This includes aspects of organizational performance and its measurement comprising its shift from purely financially measured methods to multidimensional approaches. Practical solutions for the evaluation of management systems are suggested, which show the strategic relevance of management systems and its influence on process performance. The presented evaluation model offers an extended use of the balanced scorecard together with the strategic map-process, the execution premium and the plan-do-check-act-cycle of management systems providing an approach for scientists and practitioners to use and extend it.

This book provides comprehensive guidance on leveraging SAP IBP technology to connect strategic (to be understood as long term SC&O), tactical and operational planning into one coherent process framework, presenting experience shared by practitioners in workshops, customer presentations, business, and IT transformation projects. It offers use cases and a wealth of practical tips to ensure that readers understand the challenges and advantages of IBP implementation. The book starts by characterizing disconnected planning and contrasting this with key elements of a transformation project approach. It explains the functional foundations and SAP Hybris, Trade Promotion Planning, Customer Business Planning, ARIBA, and S/4 integration with SAP IBP. It then presents process for integrating finance in IBP. Annual planning and monthly planning are taken as examples of explain Long term planning (in some companies labeled as strategic). The core of the book is about sales and operations planning (S&OP) and its process steps, product demand, supply review, integrated reconciliation and management business review, illustrating all steps with use cases. It describes unconstrained and constrained optimized supply planning, inventory optimization, shelf life planning. We explain how to improve responsiveness with order-based allocation planning, sales order confirmation, and big deal / tender management coupled with simultaneous re-planning of supply. The book closes with a chapter on performance measurement, measurement of effectiveness, efficiency, and adherence.   

This book provides both a broad overview of the forecasting process, covering technological and human aspects alike, and deep insights into algorithms and platform functionalities in the IBP toolbox required to maximize forecast accuracy. Rich in technical and business explanations, it addresses short-, medium- and long-term forecasting processes using functionalities available in demand planning and demand sensing. There are also several theoretical concepts underpinning the algorithms discussed; these are explained with numerical examples to help demystify the IBP forecasting toolbox. Beyond standard procedures, the book also discusses custom approaches (e.g. new segmentation criteria, new outlier detection and correction methods) and new methods (e.g. the use of Markov chains for forecasting sporadic demands), etc. It subsequently benchmarks common practices using these innovative approaches and discusses the results. As measurement is an important precondition for improvement, an entire chapter is devoted to discussing process improvement and value using the Six Sigma methodology. In closing, the book provides several useful tips and tricks that should come in handy during project implementation.