Process-oriented Collaborative Applications

In the 1990s, customers, competition, and change (3C) have deeply affected the survival and development of many enterprises. Currently, many industries in our country have been confronted with the problems of increasing product complexity, shorter product life-cycle time, more product customization, higher customer expectation, larger market, more competitors, and so on. At the same time, domestic competition and globalization have threatened the survival of many organizations. How to use the management methodologies, such as Total Quality Management, Business Process Reengineering, 6σ, and other strategies to improve the organizational competitiveness is a question which the enterprises should deal with.This paper's main contents include:Firstly, this paper discussed the challenges the enterprises management has faced: the change of business environment, the need of change for the organization structure, and how to select the proper management strategies. Then a review of the literature on TQM, BPR, and the integration of TQM and BPR is conducted.Secondly, according to the literature of TQM and BPR, the origin, the definition, the main idea, the principle, and the development trend of TQM and BPR are discussed. Through the comparison of TQM and BPR, we find that the two methodologies are attributed to management changing strategy; they are developed from different areas, however all can improve organization performance by analyzing, designing, and managing the processes of the organization. Then the feasibility and validity of the integration of TQM and BPR are analyzed.Thirdly, on the base of analysis of Process Management, several important methodologies with process dominance are discussed, such as TQM, BPR, 6s, Lean Manufacturing, and so on. Despite coming from different fields and having different backgrounds, these methodologies are attributed to some aspects of process analysis, design, and management to pursue some multidimensional process improvement. Then the synergy of methodologies based on process is constructed to a Business Process Management framework to respond to the challenge of rapid changing.In the end of this paper, several cases of synergetic application of management methodologies with process dominance are analyzed. These cases come from ABC Company, which has achieved a great improvement in products' time, quality, cost, service, and some other aspects using this synergetic method. Finally, sum up the contents discussed in this paper and give further directions about the study in next step.