Largest European applied research organisation shows benefits of BPM and SOA

The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Engineering has selected Cordys, the leading provider of software for business process innovation, to study SOA based business process management (BPM) in its business modelling company.

With over 80 research centres including 56 Fraunhofer Institutes, a staff of 17,000 employees, an annual research budget of over €1.6 billion and affiliated research centres and representative offices in Europe, USA and Asia, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is Europe’s largest applied research organisation.

The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial engineering has established a business simulation and process modelling company with the goal to study the effect of Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management on operational improvements. Companies and organisations considering implementing SOA and BPM can visit the Institute and see the possibilities and benefits in a real-life business environment. All business processes in the simulated company, from the orders in the webshop to the updates in the ERP system, are managed by the Cordys Business Operations Platform.

Jochen Kokemüller, Program Manager at Fraunhofer: “We selected the Cordys Platform because of its ability to demonstrate the main benefit of SOA, which is the possibility to build an IT architecture that is geared towards meeting the business requirements.”

The Cordys Business Operations Platform connects all enterprise systems in the entire supply chain through web services. In the Fraunhofer Model Company these include a webshop, an open source ERP system, a manufacturing application, RFID hard- and software and a CRM solution. The functionalities of these different systems can now be changed, enhanced and combined without touching the software. The results of the research show that this enables enterprises to become more agile and react faster to new market conditions. Jochen Kokemüller: “The business department decides about the process flow, without writing a single line of code, just by using a graphical modelling environment."

Per Jonsson, President and Chief Operating Officer at Cordys: “Most enterprises in manufacturing have automated their core production and order management processes, but management and supporting processes are still characterised by integration gaps and manual steps. The research project of Fraunhofer Institute shows how the integrated BPM solution of Cordys is able to integrate and automate all business processes, independent of the underlying systems. This will not only allow users to create an integrated and efficient supply chain, but also to adopt agile production and management methods, which is exactly what today’s manufacturing industry requires."