Process Integration Case Study In today's unpredictable global business environment, organizations must be laterally integrated so that customer requirements are accurately translated into the...

Integrating business processes for global alignment and supply chain management
According to McAdam and McCormack (2001), with the advent of globalization and increased
competition, organizations across the globe need to re-invent themselves continuously in order to
stay a
east from the competitors. They further explained that only less than 10% of the firms
globally re-invent themselves for survival, while all the other firms re-invent to stay competitive.
The process of continuously analyzing and improving the business fundamentals and other major
elements of the organization’s operation is known as business process management (BPM). In
BPM, benchmarking and continuous monitoring plays an important role that helps a firm in re-
inventing its operations. McAdam and McCormack (2001) further pointed out that BPM is not a
one-off strategy, neither it’s a gradual improvement, rather BPM is the process of continuous re-
invention.
In their quest to re-invent, global organizations aim for standardization besides ensuring effective
coordination between the various stakeholders including suppliers and customers. This implies
that the coordination between various activities right from sourcing of raw materials to the
manufacturing and delivery of finished goods to the end customer must be very high and
efficient. This is known as supply chain management (SCM). Increasingly SCM is being
ecognized as the process or management of business processes across the organization present
on the supply chain or which constitutes the supply chain of an organization. According to
Hammer (2001) since the companies have now been able to re-engineer business processes
inhouse, they would need to integrate it amongst the firms in order to be successful and effective.
According to Croxton (2001), streamlining of business process across companies would help in
educing the costs, besides ensuring that quality is enhanced and operations are made more
efficient. This identified area would remain the key differentiator and driver of productivity over
the next decade (Croxton, 2001).
McAdam and McCormack conducted a detailed research to understand and establish the
elationship between business process management and supply chain management. The results of
the research provided little evidence of firms being able to successfully integrate business
process along with supply chain. While the concept of business process management is applied
to a single entity, the concept of supply chain is not limited by company. The study conducted by
McAdam and McCormack focused on one entity in a supply chain and their relationship across
the supply chain i.e. with the suppliers and their immediate customers. All the firms researched
and analyzed by McAdam and McCormack had quality control and management systems in
place, besides regular assessment (both internal and external). According to the surveys
conducted by McAdam and McCormack, there was limited evidence to suggest that
organizations were exploiting the integration of business processes in their supply chain.
In order to integrate business processes across its supply chain i.e. both customers and suppliers,
Nortel formulated “Manufacturing 2000” initiative that aimed at rationalizing the manufacturing
plants of the company into supply chain centers. Each of the supply chain centers would be
100% autonomous and would be given the responsibility of managing the supply chain activities
for a range of products. This includes all the activities right...