Business re-engineering through integration of methods and tools for process innovation

A business process may be considered a technical system that generates value by turning available resources into products or services to be sold. When the process is not able to exploit all available resources in terms of market demand, raw materials, etc., the value generated by the system decreases owing to a lack of functionality or performance. The current paper presents an original road-map, based on the integration of different methods and tools (namely IDEF, TRIZ, TOC), able to support the analysis of an industrial production process in order to identify business opportunities that are not exploited to their maximum extent. The proposed approach goes from the As-Is process to the definition of a To-Be model by moving from the actual reality to the economic domain and then back to the desired or expected future reality. The link between these two domains is constituted by the functional domain, and the identification of the functional needs is the step to define innovation challenges aimed at removing business limits. An application of the road-map to improve the production process of solid biofuels is also presented as a case study in order to clarify and validate the proposed approach.

[1]  K. Sivakumar,et al.  Implementation of industrial process innovations: factors, effects, and marketing implications , 1999 .

[2]  Thomas H. Davenport,et al.  Process Innovation: Reengineering Work Through Information Technology , 1992 .

[3]  H. William Dettmer,et al.  Goldratt's Theory of Constraints: A Systems Approach to Continuous Improvement , 1997 .

[4]  H. A. Reijersa,et al.  Best practices in business process redesign : an overview and qualitative evaluation of successful redesign heuristics , 2005 .

[5]  Victor Fey,et al.  Innovation on Demand: New Product Development Using TRIZ , 2005 .

[6]  Tim Baines,et al.  A review of multi-factor capacity expansion models for manufacturing plants: Searching for a holistic decision aid , 2007 .

[7]  Samuel H. Huang,et al.  Manufacturing productivity improvement using effectiveness metrics and simulation analysis , 2003 .

[8]  Colin Herron,et al.  A methodology for developing sustainable quantifiable productivity improvement in manufacturing companies , 2006 .

[9]  Denis Cavallucci,et al.  From TRIZ to OTSM-TRIZ: addressing complexity challenges in inventive design , 2007 .

[10]  Paul Braiden,et al.  Using business process re-engineering for the development of production efficiency in companies making engineered to order products , 2004 .

[11]  G. Altshuller.  Creativity as an exact science : the theory of the solution of inventive problems , 1984 .

[12]  K. K. Chan,et al.  An integrated multidimensional process improvement methodology for manufacturing systems , 2003 .

[13]  R. Dufo-López,et al.  Economical and environmental analysis of grid connected photovoltaic systems in Spain , 2006 .

[14]  Kwei Tang,et al.  Process improvement for a container-filling process with random shifts , 2000 .

[15]  Victor Fey,et al.  Innovation on Demand: Frontmatter , 2005 .

[16]  Robert Padulo,et al.  Business Process Reengineering: BreakPoint Strategies for Market Dominance , 1994, J. Inf. Technol..

[17]  Yon-Chun Chou,et al.  Evaluating alternative capacity strategies in semiconductor manufacturing under uncertain demand and price scenarios , 2007 .

[18]  Gaetano Cascini,et al.  Natural Language Processing of Patents and Technical Documentation , 2004, Document Analysis Systems.

[19]  Jorma Papinniemi,et al.  Creating a model of process innovation for reengineering of business and manufacturing , 1999 .

[20]  Madara Ogot.  EMS Models : Adaptation Of Engineering Design Black-Box Models For Use In TRIZ Madara Ogot , 2005 .

[21]  F. Caeldries.  Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution , 1994 .

[22]  Victor Fey,et al.  Innovation on Demand by Victor Fey , 2005 .

[23]  Paulo Carlos Kaminski,et al.  Product development process with focus on value engineering and target-costing: A case study in an automotive company , 2007 .

[24]  Davide Russo,et al.  Computer-Aided Patent Analysis: finding invention peculiarities , 2007, IFIP CAI.