Seamless Business Processes for Tomorrow's Enterprises - Questionnaire

We used the uploaded questionnaire as the foundation for our semi-structured interviews with industry experts in various industries such as technology, manufacturing, e-commerce, and logistics. The results of the interviews are described in our paper "Seamless Business Processes for Tomorrow’s Enterprises - From Full-fledged ERP systems Towards Modular, Process-centric Business Process Platforms."

Abstract

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are at the core of enterprises, enabling business operations by providing standardized digital processes. While current full-fledged ERP systems cover many domains, this also makes these systems complex to run and maintain. Startups and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) do not require a comprehensive ERP system, and running only a simplified subset of the functionality is often not supported. Therefore, a new company starts its operations using lightweight solutions such as spreadsheets or individual business applications. Successful startups will outgrow their initial business applications and are forced to migrate to advanced solutions offering support for analytics, international markets, or additional company branches. Such migrations will occur multiple times in a company’s lifecycle, repeatedly putting the company at risk due to disruptions of the entire IT infrastructure. To tackle these interruptions, we pose the following guiding question:
Which design principles enable a business process platform seamlessly support companies’ business processes while growing?
In this paper, we first discuss the challenges of current ERP systems in companies of varying sizes, based on 15 interviews with industry experts. Second, we present enablers of future business software and discuss how they relate to current ERP systems’ challenges. Based on this analysis, we propose a vision of a modular, process-centric business platform that promotes business processes to first-class entities. We argue that the enablers and our proposed business platform provide a foundation for research on the next generation of business software for tomorrow’s enterprises.