Value-Based Management of Inter-Organizational Business Processes

Abstract

Business process management must not be limited to a single enterprise. Just as intra-organizational business processes also inter-organizational ones have to be object of process management. Especially with a view to new forms of cooperation among enterprises the importance of inter-organizational business processes increases. The sub-functions of an overall business process management are the identification, modeling, design, optimization, and implementation of business processes as well as follow-on monitoring and periodical control of all redesigned processes. The execution of these sub-functions requires suitable methods which show the economical consequences of decision alternatives within the management of inter-organizational business processes. This paper describes a value-based approach for inter-organizational business process management. The approach is based on the analysis of process costs and process revenues. By presenting this approach, U.S.-American and German peculiarities concerning business process management, especially process-oriented accounting methods for process cost evaluation, are considered. The value-based approach is implemented into the prototype of a multi-agent-system named PRINCESS. The system concept as well as its verification and validation in a case-study are also shown.