Business process flexibility: a driver for outsourcing

Many organizations have implemented business process management solutions that are enabled by enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. More recently, organizations have focused their strategies on the additional benefits that are realizable by augmenting ERP with customer and supplier extensions. This paper focuses on the process integration issues that must be addressed when linking customers and suppliers to back‐office systems. Our hypothesis is that flexible process management, as required by modern customer/supplier relationships, are too costly to implement via traditional ERP solutions. Given that modern competitive advantage is measured in terms of business process flexibility, managers are faced with the daunting prospect of changing ERP configurations on a continuous basis. Such rapid process change requirements are beyond the financial capabilities of most companies, who prefer to leave a well‐tested configuration unchanged. How then are companies managing to deploy fast‐paced process change to support their new e‐business models? This paper describes the strategies that are being used to provide and maintain flexible eBusiness solutions.