Towards Intelligent Supply Chains: A Unified Framework for Business Process Design

In their struggle for operational excellence, global companies face challenges in finding a common denominator to streamline and align supply chain operations across business units. The ever growing complexity of managing global flows of products, information and capital increases the risk of deploying inapt operations leading to deterioration of profits. To address this problem, the authors propose a unified business process design framework based on the paradigm of intelligence. Intelligence allows humans and human-designed systems cope with environmental volatility, and the authors argue that its principles applied to the context of organizational processes can increase the success rate of business operations. The framework is created using a set of theoretical based constructs grounded in a discussion across several streams of research including psychology, pedagogy, artificial intelligence, learning, business process management and supply chain management. It outlines a number of system tasks combined in four integrated management perspectives: build, execute, grow and innovate, put forward as business process design propositions for Intelligent Supply Chains.