Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Enterprise and Business Process Automation

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Springer Handbook of Automation

Part of the book series: Springer Handbooks ((SHB))

Abstract

Organizations have long struggled with a lack of horizontal and vertical integration and the need to achieve high degrees of coordination across the enterprise. The solution to this challenge was the emergence of Enterprise Systems (ES) and then Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which came along with the promise of a common database and a single source of “truth” to enable management to make data-driven decisions. In this chapter, we explore the relationship between how enterprises, technology, and competitive dynamics changed over time, enabling the emergence of ERP I, ERP II, and now ERP III – three eras of the ERP movement. We also look forward at blockchain-based, cloud-based, and AI-based ERP systems and the impact that these systems will have on business processes and workflow automation for enterprises of the future.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 309.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 399.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  1. O’Leary, D.E.: Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Systems, Life Cycle, Electronic Commerce, and Risk. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Davenport, T.H.: Putting the enterprise into the enterprise system. In: Harvard Business Review, pp. 121–131. Harvard Business Publishing, Boston (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Morton, M.S.S. (ed.): The Corporation of the 1990s: Information Technology and Organizational Transformation. Oxford University Press, New York (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Buck-Emden, R., Galimow, J.: SAP R/3 System. Addison-Wesley, Harlow (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Peters, T.J., Waterman, R.H.: In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies. Harper & Row, New York (1982)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Kirchmer, M.: Business process oriented implementation of standard software: how to achieve competitive advantage quickly and efficiently. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  7. Bendoly, E., Jacobs, F.R.: Strategic ERP Extension and Use. Stanford University Press, Stanford (2005)

    Google Scholar 

  8. Harrington, H.J.: Business Process Improvement: The Breakthrough Stragey for Total Quality, Productivity, and Competitiveness. McGraw-Hill Education, New York (1991)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Senge, P.: The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Currency Doubleday, New York (1990)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Hammer, M., Champy, J.: Reengineering the Corporation: A Manifesto for Business Revolution. Harper Business, New York (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  11. Davenport, T.H.: Process Innovation – Reengineering Work Through Information Technology. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (1993)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Hammer, M.: Beyond Reengineering: How the Process-Centered Organization is Changing Our Work and Our Lives. Harper Business, New York (1996)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Shapiro, B.P., Rangan, V.K., Sviokla, J.J.: Staple yourself to an order. In: Harvard Business Review, pp. 113–122. Harvard Business Publishing, Boston (1992)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Seybold, P.B., Marshak, R.T.: Customers.com: How to Create a Profitable Business Strategy for the Internet and beyond. Crown Business, New York (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Mui, C., Downes, L.: Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  16. Bradley, S.P., Nolan, R.L. (eds.): Capturing value in the network era in sense and respond. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  17. Keller, G., Teufel, T.: SAP R/3 process orientation implementation. Addison-Wesley, Harlow (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Scheer, A.-W., et al. (eds.): Business process excellence: ARIS in practice. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  19. Miranda, R.: The rise of ERP technology in the public sector. Gov. Finance Rev., 9–18 (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Benchmarking Partners: ERP’s Second Wave – Maximizing the Value of ERP-Enabled Processes, Deloitte Consulting Report, ISBN 1-892383-36-5. Deloitte Consulting, LLC, Atlanta (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  21. Davenport, T.H., Harris, J.G., Cantrell, S.: The return of enterprise solutions: the director’s cut. In: Accenture Institute for Strategy Change Report. Accenture, Cambridge (2002)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Shang, S., Seddon, P.B.: A comprehensive framework for assessing and managing the benefits of enterprise systems: the business manager's perspective. In: Shanks, G., Seddon, P.B., Willcocks, L. (eds.) Second-Wave Enterprise Resource Planning Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  23. Tulivaye Hasheela, V., Smolander, K.: What do we know about ERP in SMEs? Identify. Gaps Res. In V. Strahonja, N. Vrček., D. Plantak Vukovac, C. Barry, M. Lang, H. Linger, & C. Schneider (Eds.), Information Systems Development: Transforming Organisations and Society through Information Systems (ISD2014 Proceedings). Croatia: Faculty of Organization and Informatics. 77–84 (2014) http://aisel.aisnet.org/isd2014/proceedings/ReshapingOrganisations/10

  24. Watson, E.F., Holmes, K.: Business process automation: ERP, CRM, and SCM. In: Nof, S. (ed.) Springer Handbook of Automation. Springer-Verlag, Berlin Heidelberg (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  25. Bancroft, N.H., Seip, H., Sprengel, A.: Implementing SAP R/3, 2nd edn. Greenwich, Manning (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  26. Brown, E.: VF corp. changes its underware. Fortune, 115–118 (1998)

    Google Scholar 

  27. Davenport, T.H.: Mission Critical – Realizing the Promise of Enterprise Systems. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  28. Drucker, P.F.: Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Harper Business, New York (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  29. Nonaka, I., Takeuchi, H.: The Knowledge-Creating Company. Oxford University Press, New York (1995)

    Google Scholar 

  30. Davenport, T.H., Harris, J.G.: Competing on analytics – the new science of winning. Harvard Business School Press, Boston (2006)

    Google Scholar 

  31. Kalakota, R., Robinson, M.: e-Business 2.0: Roadmap for Success. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2001)

    Google Scholar 

  32. Christensen, C.: The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business. Harper Collins, New York (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  33. Ordanini, A., Pasini, P.: Service co-production and value co-creation: the case for a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Eur. Manag. J. 26(5), 289–297 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  34. Chaves, J.T., de Freitas, S.A.: A systematic literature review for service-oriented architecture and agile development. In: International Conference on Computational Science and Its Applications, pp. 120–135. Springer, Cham (1 July 2019)

    Google Scholar 

  35. MacLennan, E., Van Belle, J.P.: Factors affecting the organizational adoption of service-oriented architecture (SOA). IseB. 12(1), 71–100 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  36. Niknejad, N., Ismail, W., Ghani, I., Nazari, B., Bahari, M.: Understanding Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA): a systematic literature review and directions for further investigation. Inf. Syst. 91, 101491 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  37. Tews, R.: Beyond IT: the business value of SOA. In: AIIM e-Doc, p. 14–17 (2007)

    Google Scholar 

  38. Rochet, J.-C., Tirole, J.: Platform competition in two-sided markets. J. Eur. Econ. Assoc. 1(4), 990–1029 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

  39. Gawer, A., Cusumano, M.A.: Industry platforms and ecosystem innovation. J. Prod. Innov. Manag. 31(3), 417–433 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  40. Thomas, L.D.W., Autio, E., Gann, D.M.: Architectural leverage: putting platforms in context. Acad. Manag. Perspect. 28(2), 198–219 (2014)

    Google Scholar 

  41. Wood, B.: ERP vs. ERP2 vs. ERP3 future enterprise applications. Available from: http://www.r3now.com/erp-vs-erp-ii-vs-erp-iii-future-enterprise-applications (2010)

  42. Wan, Y., Clegg, B.: Managing ERP, interoperability, strategy and dynamic change in enterprises. In: POMS 22nd Annual Conference, Reno (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  43. Buyya, R., et al.: Cloud computing and emerging it platforms: vision, hype, and reality for delivering computing as the 5th utility. Futur. Gener. Comput. Syst. 25(6), 599–616 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  44. Mell, P., Grance, T.: Effectively and securely using the cloud computing paradigm. NIST Inf. Technol. Lab. 2(8), 304–311 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  45. Wischik, D., Handley, M., Braun, M.B.: The resource pooling principle. ACM SIGCOMM Comput. Commun. Rev. 38(5), 47–52 (2008)

    Google Scholar 

  46. Takabi, H., Joshi, J.B., Ahn, G.-J.: Security and privacy challenges in cloud computing environments. IEEE Secur. Priv. 8(6), 24–31 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  47. Hofmann, P., Woods, D.: Cloud computing: the limits of public clouds for business applications. IEEE Internet Comput. 14(6), 90–93 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  48. Marston, S., et al.: Cloud computing—the business perspective. Decis. Support. Syst. 51(1), 176–189 (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  49. Tapscott, D., Tapscott, A.: Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World. Portfolio/Penguin, New York, (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  50. Xu, X., et al.: The blockchain as a software connector. In: 13th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA 2016). Venice (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  51. Kosba, A., et al.: Hawk: the blockchain model of cryptography and privacy-preserving smart contracts. In: IACR working paper (2015)

    Google Scholar 

  52. Madanhire, I., Mbohwa, C.: Enterprise resource planning (ERP) in improving operational efficiency: case study. Procedia CIRP. 40, 225–229 (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  53. Hwang, W.: The drivers of ERP implementation and its impact on organizational capabilities and performance and customer value. Toledo T.U.o. (ed.) (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  54. Parikh, T.: The ERP of the future : Blockchain of things. Int. J. Sci. Res. Sci. Eng. Technol. 4(1), 1341–1348 (2018)

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  55. Mann, S., et al.: Blockchain technology for supply chain traceability, transparency and data provenance. In: ICBTA 2018: 2018 International Conference on Blockchain Technology and Application (2018)

    Google Scholar 

  56. Hader, M., Elmhamedi, A., Abouabdellah, A.: Blockchain integrated ERP fora Bette supply chain management. In: 2020 IEEE 7th International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Applications (ICIEA) (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  57. Dey, L., Verma, I., Khurdiya, A., Bharadwaja, S.: A framework to integrate unstructured and structured data for enterprise analytics. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Information Fusion, Instanbul, Turkey, 9–12 July 2013. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/6641249

  58. Park, B.-K., Song, I.-Y.: Toward total business intelligence incorporating structured and unstructured data. ACM SIGMOD Record, Vol. 41, No. 3, Report of the International Workshop on Business Intelligence and the Web: BEWEB 2011, Sept 2012, pp. 51–53. https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2380776.2380789 (5 Oct 2012)

  59. Hong, N., Wen, A., Shen, F., Sohn, S., Liu, S., Liu, H.: Integrating structured and unstructured EHR data using an FHIR-based Tyge system: a case study with medication data. In: Proceedings of the AMIA Joint Summits on Translational Science, pp. 74–83, Published online 18 May 2018

    Google Scholar 

  60. Butt, F.M., Hussain, L., Mahmood, A., Lone, K.J.: Artificial intelligence based accurately load forecasting system to forecast short and medium-term load demands. Math. Biosci. Eng. 18(1), 400–425 (2021) Published 4 Dec 2020. Special Issue: Advances in Applied Computational Science. https://www.aimspress.com/article/doi/10.3934/mbe.2021022?viewType=HTML

    MathSciNet  Google Scholar 

  61. Ghangari, A., Hadavandi, E., Abbasian-Naghneh, S.: Comparison of artificial intelligence based techniques for short term load forecasting. In: 2010 Third International Conferene on Business Intelligence and Financial Engineering, IEEE Computer Society. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/232633325_Compari son_of_Artificial_Intelligence_Based_Techniques_for_Short_ Term_Load_Forecasting (Aug 2010)

  62. Raza, M.Q., Khosravi, A.: A review of artificial intelligence based load demand forecasting techniques for smart grid and buildings. Renew. Sust. Energ. Rev. 50, 1352–1372 (2015) https://www. sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1364032115003354

  63. Drenik, G.: Improved forecasting through machine learning & artificial intelligence. Forbes. https://www.forbes.com/sites /forbesinsights/2019/06/25/improved-forecasting-through- machine-learning-artificial-intelligence/?sh=6cba912162e8 (25 June 2019)

  64. Szabados, R.: How AI simplifies your workflow, Chanty blog, posted on 26 Dec 26, 2017. https://www.chanty.com/blog/ai-simplifies-workflow/

  65. Perr, J.: The automated AI workflow is here … if you Know where to Look. In: Conference Proceedings of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE), 22–25 Oct 2018, Los Angeles. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8609871

  66. van der Aalst, W.M.P., Bichler, M., Heinzl, A.: Robotic process automation. Bus. Inf. Syst. Eng. 60, 269–272 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-018-0542-4

    Article  Google Scholar 

  67. Cath, C.: Governing Artificial Intelligence: Ethical, Legal and Technical Opportunities and Challenges. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences, London, United Kingdom, 376(2133), (2018). https://doi.org/10.1098/rsta.2018.0080

  68. Tadapaneni, N.R.: Artificial intelligence security and its countermeasures. Int. J. Adv. Res. Comput. Sci. Technol. 8(1), 2792–2795 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  69. Osoba, O.A., Welser IV, W.: An Intelligence in Our Image: The Risks of Bias and Errors in Artificial Intelligence. Santa Monica, CA, Rand Corporation (2017). https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR1744.html

Further Reading

  • Aguirre, S., Rodriguez, A.: Automation of a business process using robotic process automation (RPA): a case study. In: Workshop on engineering applications (WEA), pp. 65–71. Springer (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  • Doguc, O.: Robot process automation (RPA) and its future. In Research anthology on cross-disciplinary designs and applications of automation. Hershey, PA: IGI Global. pp. 35–58 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  • Hofmann, P., Samp, C., Urback, N.: Robotic process automation. Electron. Mark. 30(1), 99–106 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  • Mahey, H.: Robotic Process Automation with Automation Anywhere: Techniques to Fuel Business Productivity and Intelligent Automation Using RPA. Packt Publishing (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  • Peters, T.: The Project 50 – Reinventing Work. Knopf, New York (1999)

    Google Scholar 

  • Shin, S.: Trend of process automation and factory automation. In: 2006 SICE-ICASE International Joint Conference, pp. 157–160, https://doi.org/10.1109/SICE.2006.315392 (2006)

  • Taulli, T.: The Robotic Process Automation Handbook: A Guide to Implementing RPA Systems. Apress (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  • Willcocks, L., Lacity, M., Craig, A.: Robotic process automation: strategic transformation lever for global business services? J. Inf. Technol. Teach. Cases. 7, 17–28 (2017)

    Google Scholar 

  • Willcocks, L.P., Lacity, M., Craig, A.: The IT function and robotic process automation, London School of Economics, The Outsourcing Unit Working Research Paper Series, Paper 15/05, pp. 1–39, https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/64519/1/OUWRPS_15_05_published.pdf (Oct 2015)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    Edward F. Watson III & Andrew H. Schwarz

Authors
  1. Edward F. Watson III
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Andrew H. Schwarz
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Edward F. Watson III .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. PRISM Center and School of Industrial Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA

    Shimon Y. Nof

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2023 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Watson III, E.F., Schwarz, A.H. (2023). Enterprise and Business Process Automation. In: Nof, S.Y. (eds) Springer Handbook of Automation. Springer Handbooks. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96729-1_65

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation