Multi-Department & Company Processes

While every company, and discipline within a company, will have specific processes and tasks, these groups do not operate independently. Multiple departments and multiple trading partners will participate in most end-to-end business processes in a modern company. Every group depends on others to do their jobs effectively, and to keep the business activities flowing.

Various disciplines and trading partners in industry networks will collaborate - or at least communicate - to enable success in every other business area. For example, an innovation process clearly involves not only R&D, but also an understanding of customer requirements which may come directly from customers, or from distributors or sales and marketing teams. Effective innovation also requires an understanding of production, distribution, and constraints and capabilities, plus environmental regulations.

Every major business process involves all of these areas, and requires an ability to view the same product, customer, or function from various angles. For example, inventory could be counted in dollar value, in units during the production process, or in tanks or pallets as it is shipped. It may also change ownership during that process and have different item numbers and relevant attributes assigned by various owners. All of these views are critical for clear and meaningful communication among departments and partners.

So working among diverse parties presents some complexity that departmental work may not. To support this complexity, special classes of applications and IT infrastructure have emerged that allow not only timely communication and meaningful collaboration, but also the ability to swap trading partners in and out of their network easily. Cambashi understands that the foundations for these systems are different from those for tightly-controlled internal processes, and that implementing these systems usually requires knowledge and expertise that companies may not already have.