Fraunhofer Institute selects Cordys for BPM research

Largest European applied research organization shows benefits of BPM and SOA

Stuttgart, Germany and Putten, The Netherlands, 22 June 2010 – 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 modeling company.

With over 80 research centers including 56 Fraunhofer Institutes, a staff of 17.000 employees, an annual research budget of over € 1.6 billion and affiliated research centers and representative offices in Europe, USA and Asia, the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft is Europe’s largest applied research organization.

SOA and BPM benefits
The Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial engineering has established a business simulation and process modeling company with the goal to study the effect of Service Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management on operational improvements. Companies and organizations 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.”

Increased agility in the supply chain
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.“

Opportunity for the manufacturing industry
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 characterized by integration gaps and manual steps. The research project of Fraunhofer Institite 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.“

 

About Fraunhofer Gesellschaft
The Fraunhofer Society is the leading organization of applied research in Germany. It operates some 80 research units, including 59 Fraunhofer Institutes, at over 40 different locations in Germany. The majority of the roughly 17,000 staff are qualified scientists and engineers, who work with an annual research budget of over 1,6 billion euros. Of this sum, more than 1,3 billion is generated through contract research. Roughly two thirds of the Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft’s contract research revenue is derived from contracts with industry and from publicly financed research projects. The remaining one third is contributed by the German federal and Länder governments, partly as a means of enabling the institutes to pursue more fundamental research in areas that are likely to become relevant to industry and society in five or ten years’ time. Fraunhofer has affiliated research centers and representative offices in Europe, USA and Asia