B2B Integration : A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce

126 B2B Integration — A Practical Guide to Collaborative E-commerce
5.1. Existence of 'Organization Silos'
In today's typical small, medium or large sized company, only certain
parts of the business processes that form the backbone of any company's
business are automated. With little integration among different departments
and systems supporting various business process activities, several
isolated islands of information, known as organization silos, exist within
a company.
Much human intervention is required to complete these processes,
causing increased response time and slower cycle time. Furthermore,
several of the currently automated business processes are fragmented in
nature, with applications and data underlying them owned by different
organizational units.
The primary goal of dynamic real-time B2Bi cannot be achieved if
the underlying business processes are not automated and integrated to
work at Internet speed with complete accuracy, flexibility and adaptability.
A successful implementation of B2Bi requires a business process management
(BPM) strategy that leads to sound end-to-end, cross-application
and cross-organization business process integration.
BPM enables collaboration among trading partners in a secured,
scalable and reliable manner. It does so by supporting dynamic process
topologies that allow the boundary between processes and participants
to be determined either statically or dynamically on a real-time basis.
5.2. Fundamentals of BPM
This section describes the fundamentals of business process management,
as they relate to B2Bi.
5.2.1. Business processes
A business process is a logical collection of tasks or activities involving
internal and external systems and human decision-makers which needs
to be achieved as part of an overall outcome for both an organization
and, more importantly, for its customers. A business process can also be
defined as one of the various processes needed within an organization
to deliver service to its customers.