IBM: Respond to market changes with agility

With "Blue Harmony" to enhance agility, speed up the process of global integration IBM

Supported by strong global technology force, cross-border and seamless business integration through process integration, seizing the opportunities of global market growth and speeding up the global integration process is the result of IBM's consistent emphasis on its Global Integrated Enterprise ( GIE ) Strategy. To help IBM respond to the agile needs of its business processes and adapt to changing business models in the marketplace, the Blue Harmony project was presented,

IBM worldwide operations of its three stages of the process: "The opportunity to order", "order to cash" and "financial" implemented a streamlined management and deployment of a standardized way, it is thanks to lead the business transformation project " Blue Harmony " . Through the establishment of an integrated workflow system to improve collaboration between IBM and customers, suppliers, effectively reducing repetitive consumption of resources, return on investment while improving productivity (Return On Investment, referred to as ROI) obtained steadily for IBM The company contributes to achieving the 2015 Wall Street road map goals and the Global Integrated Enterprise ( GIE ) strategy. The success of IBM 's transition project has fully demonstrated the agility of IBM's software capabilities.

Business Challenges - Efficient Business Processes Winning Transformational Markets

Looking back at the vicissitudes of the past 100 years, while changing the life style of intelligent technologies, consumers are also changing the importance they attach to the business capabilities of enterprises. The efficient and agile business system has become the weapon to stay ahead of the fierce competition. IBM also made it clear when formulating the 2015 Wall Street Roadmap that business process efficiency is imminent. In the face of market transitions, IBM, like many businesses, is struggling with the kinds of differences that exist between obsolete business process management and rapid response to market needs. How to deal with the burdensome business process, how to solve the differences of different business processes and rules all over the world are the questions worth pondering in the development of the enterprise. To support the rapidly expanding business requirements, IBM internal systems are constantly inventing and grooming emerging business modules while retaining some of the typical business processes. Fast and agile service requirements, simple and rapid service concept for IBM 's intricate management methods and models are a great challenge.

Because of the difference between market-oriented and user-oriented, each business model has its own distinctive features. For a long time, various processes, systems and tools that have been continuously developed or improved have unique operating modes. Even different laws and regulations And environmental requirements, organizational and personal habits of thinking, these are IBM global business challenges to streamline the work. For example, the hardware department can complete the delivery after the hardware device is signed, and the service department must enter the system confirmation after the engineer finishes the customer demand and finally get the customer's approval to complete the partial delivery. The two business processes have essential differences, Even if the same business in different countries processes are not the same. Effective reunification and integration are the keys to solving this difficult problem. Collaboration among various units and regions is also indispensable.

As a global leader in technology services, IBM is leveraging its deep technology background and financial resources to launch the Blue Harmony project worldwide, hoping to achieve business agility through efficient collaboration with customers and partners around the world. Mr. Samuel J. Palmisano, IBM's CEO, said: "To help IBM business agility to respond to changes in demand and the market model, 'Blue Harmony' project to achieve the company's operations through the establishment of a unified business system, thereby promoting the standardization and simplification of business processes. The project will result in close collaboration across all parts of IBM worldwide, reducing resource costs associated with repetitive work, delivering greater value for IBM and its customers by responding quickly to market needs with more agile business processes . "

IBM 's Solution - Build agile business processes and calmly respond to market challenges

In the past century, IBM has always led the development of the information industry with advanced technology, excellent management and unique products, and provided all-round technical support to users in all industries in the world in terms of information processing and business management. "Blue Harmony" is IBM 's success in embarking on its own internal integration with its own leadership in technological innovation, product performance, hands-on experience, and service experience. Throughout the project, a unified, integrated process system has been established to improve the status of a number of obsolete, non-standard business processes operating under the name IBM . Leverage consolidation across business units to help IBM drive the simplification and standardization of business processes and ultimately automate to transform itself into a globally integrated company.

IBM plans were to "business-to-order", "order to cash" and "financial" three links business processes are complete deployment by streamlining the repeated application of business processes, the establishment of standardized operational processes, enhance business agility processing power .
In the "business-to-order" process, the existing data in the system can be synchronized in real time without human input to help customer support team access to the latest data, rapid response, to seize business opportunities; based on one instance of SAP integrates all the old system, The system of internal data for unified management, to achieve quick inquiry.

By the "Blue Harmony" integration "order to cash" process can be accessed quickly, to achieve the optimal interconnection between systems; due to the 54% of transactions can be automated, replacing the original need for manual operation status of 100%, prompting close Account applications are automated to focus business units on improving productivity while reducing the pressure on salespeople to face business processes and focus more on customer service.

The unified business process also helps to integrate all kinds of data in the " financial " process, real-time access to all business data, real-time modification, can effectively reduce the duplication of resources and avoid competitive advantage reduction. For example, the original system could only run the data system twice a week or twice a day, which led to the need to spend a lot of work to correct or improve the related issues. After standardizing the operational flow system, the operational and financial systems are fully integrated into the same platform, and business data is instantly available to the financial system, reducing the probability of false data.  

As a complex enterprise transformation and process integration project, Blue Harmony is based on an SOA architecture that brings together a broad range of products and solutions from IBM itself and third parties such as WebSphere , Tivoli and IM ( Information Management , Acronym Information management), fully embodies the strong technical strength of IBM software and strong support for the agile needs of the industry. Taking a holistic view of the business process framework, architecture and business data standards, three years of steady growth so far, Blue Harmony continues to function effectively in several areas. IBM's strong software technology gives key technical support for the project: IBM Information Management Software ( IM ) helps generate, gather and deliver business performance management information, better understand business and optimize business, and IBM Integrated Services Management Software ( Tivoli ) Provides a number of integrated management solutions with IT services, assets, storage, security, etc. The deployment of WebSphere Service Registry and Repository ( WSRR ) in the project also correlates the business with the underlying implementation technologies, Agility. The full application of these software technologies helps IBM better control and execute internal and external business processes.

As IBM's global integration project, in January 2011 "Blue Harmony" in China first implemented the 0.5 release And at the same time it plans to implement version 1.0 in China and Germany in July 2012. Each version of Blue Harmony has a locally created blueprint, supported by a testing and development team, and full-featured templates will be officially released worldwide after implementation of 1.0 in Germany . After completing the deployment of the "Blue Harmony" project, IBM 's back office will achieve a complete transition, which will increase productivity and work efficiency, significantly improve ROI and make it easier for customers to collaborate with IBM . So far, "Blue Harmony" has brought an important streamlining, now canceled more than 50 existing applications. According to the plan, when the global formal launch in 2015 , it will streamline 900 applications, bringing about a total cost of about $ 3.9 billion for IBM .

Mr. Yue Yang, Delivery Project Leader, IBM Global Business Services, said: " With the successful integration of Blue Harmony , IBM will bring value to every customer, business partner, and customer-facing employee with a comprehensive product catalog, A cross-brand invoice, a common order system, and data consistency from quotation to contract to order fulfillment will be a whole new business experience. " Not only did Blue Harmony bring benefits to IBM itself, it was self-deploying , IBM is also helping some clients to conduct an overall assessment and project preparation and other business according to its own characteristics. by understanding the real needs of customers, to help achieve its goal of enterprise integration operational processes, 'Blue Harmony' project will give the industry with a global To more, more effective experience value. "

Program Benefits - IBM Software Boosts Enterprise Agility

Businesses need to streamline, automate, consolidate, and maintain their flexibility in business process management to capture the large number of opportunities in the transformational market by meeting agile needs. The gradual success of "Blue Harmony" also reflects the value of IBM software in agile improvement.

Transforming information into insight, driving product and service innovation, driving business consolidation and optimization, linking and collaboration, managing risk, security and compliance, optimizing the impact of business architecture and services, and delivering enterprise-class mobility are the primary concerns of most businesses Business needs, which is exactly what IBM software has. By combining business requirements with its own capabilities, IBM Software Group can provide organizations with comprehensive " software capabilities " of insight, agility, collaboration, innovation, optimization and security, and mobility that help businesses realize business benefits . The "Blue Harmony" the practical application of internal IBM, IBM software is the strong evidence in force in the agility to meet demand-driven business integration and optimization.

Mr. Xu Gang, general manager, WebSphere, IBM Software Group Greater China, said: "The demand for business agility roadmap and IBM's agile force proposed coincide, and agile implementation needs to be based on IBM's application infrastructure software on the Businesses can build, deploy and manage applications and services flexibly and scalably IBM can help customers get the most value out of driving innovation, transformation, and growth based on their existing business technology resources. "