Читать книгу The Digital Transformation of Logistics - Группа авторов - Страница 83

Information technology offers businesses a few different paths for improving their processes through automation (Penttinen et al. 2018). The classic business strategy dilemma is to either be led by external forces such as customers who push requests and demand from the “outside” and affect those processes “in” an organization. This is called the outside‐in approach. The alternative is to enhance “inside” capabilities and resources to be more efficient. Over the past several decades, we have seen the growth and decline of straight‐through processing (STP) (van der Aalst and van Hee 2002; ter Hofstede et al. 2010) as a type of workflow management (WFM) that evolved into business process management (BPM). BPM can be explained as process automation or used to refer to the daily exaction of processes managed through software (van der Aalst 2014; Harmon 2010). BPM became expensive as it took the outside‐in approach where new systems had to be developed from scratch and extensive integration with outside systems was needed (van der Aalst et al. 2018). Modern trends point toward a need for an increased amount of connectivity, which leads us to believe that BPM and heavyweight IT are going to continue to increase in cost and complexity (Sommerville et al. 2010). BPM use cases have been unclear and sparse through the past decade (Le Clair 2017), and RPA presents an opportunity to enable the “outside‐in” strategy where the core legacy systems can remain and the human labor is augmented or replaced by “virtual agents” (van der Aalst et al. 2018).

It is important to note that BPM can be interpreted dramatically different between companies; however, in general, it is referring to the strategy of a cross‐functional attempt to increase productivity through systematic governance and management of processes. BPM does not look at isolated processes in a vacuum but ideally takes a more holistic strategic look from an organization level to highlight, reengineer, and ideally automate processes and services (Jeston 2014). There are plenty of companies where the BPM team has the bandwidth and internal power to be able to implement an RPA solution.