Online Process Management at GBI / part 1

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Business Process Management Life Cycle

An entire life cycle sounds like a lot to work on. But isn’t that too ambitious and challenging for us? And how is “life” related to IT? As one of the students of Hochschule Harz University of Applied Sciences in Wernigerode, Germany, I sit staring at “our” Business Process Life Cycle which, in this case, consists of 5 big steps. Our professor Dr. Hans Scheruhn is presenting them and excitedly running back and forth in front of our student group trying to get us enthusiastic about his plan. Well, perhaps our SAP class will be dealing with interesting stuff for the next two semesters and not only strategically plan and improve business processes of a “live” company but also implement and control them. Maybe using SAP ERP will be fun? Somehow it feels fascinating that lots of the SAP students from all over the world might have heard of our joint company. Its name is Global Bike Inc (GBI) and its employees are all those students who have been executing the GBI case studies in the past. 

Please click on the GBI Enterprise Sustainability Balanced Scorecard for higher resolution !

But with that long path ahead of us, how and where will we start our journey? Well perhaps we should listen to the Chinese who say “Every long journey begins with the first step”. So let’s get to know the GBI and its business processes which we are going to analyze first. At this early stage of the trip we find working with SAP ERP simulations at GBI very helpful.

GBI Enterprise Model

After reading and executing the GBI case study documents and by simultaneously navigating through the GBI as-is enterprise model we got a first glance of what the GBI is all about. The enterprise model consists of different model types like organizational charts, value added chain diagrams as well as business vocabulary of GBI and much more useful information about our company. It had been created for us in advance to better understand the structure of SAP ERP and how SAP ERP is used at GBI. The different models were designed and integrated by our professor Dr. Hans Scheruhn and Brita Thielert of the Hochschule Harz University and by Stefan Weidner of the SAP University Competence Center Magdeburg using the ARIS Business Designer synchronized with the Business Blueprint of our SAP Solution Manager.

We found that GBI is a multi-national company which produces different types of bicycles and is divided into two main areas. One is GBI US, the other GBI Germany, both with their own plants and warehouses in Miami, Dallas, San Diego, Heidelberg and Hamburg. And we realized that we’ll be dealing with the whole logistics process from Materials Management (MM) to Production Planning (PP) and Sales and Distribution (SD) at GBI based on SAP ERP. 

GBI Sustainabilty Balanced Scorecard

Motivated by the strategic goals defined in an enterprise sustainability balanced-scorecard of GBI each and every one of us gets one process to improve during the next two semesters. I am assigned to the compelling task to work on the Human Capital Management (HCM) at GBI to accomplish the company’s goals defined in the HCM department Balanced Scorecard. It even deals with “Self-fulfillment” and via cause and effect chains it connects my personal objectives to the companies objectives. That really sounds sustainable! All department Balanced Scorecards of GBI e.g. warehouse, procurement, production etc. - each of them assigned to one of my class mates - are connected via internal customer relationships with each other. They are depicted in the GBI enterprise model of the so called to-be status.

How well our internal customer relationships will work you'll see in the upcoming blog posts in this series.

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