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End-to-End Processes

How seamless digital processes improve your market orientation and boost your performance

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Businesses are always looking for operative ways to realize their strategic responses to market challenges. Carefully planned and consistently implemented end-to-end processes can play a key role in this regard: A company that optimizes business processes based on an end-to-end approach, rather than via a series of island solutions, will be able to navigate more effectively when the going gets tough.

An end-to-end approach reliably delivers successful market orientation, but also productive, efficient and cost-optimized product creation.

What, then, are end-to-end processes? And what steps can a business take to achieve them? 

Business Potentials of End-to-End Processes

End-to-end processes help you to reliably attain your business targets, because they consistently orient your value streams and their processes on those targets and on your company’s specific strengths.

Piecemeal incorporation of individual interests and individual processes may well have worked for you in the past, and it may still get you to your goal. But this approach will likely reduce your agility and may lead your company off on unproductive tangents.

End-to-end processes, by contrast, clearly define what operational excellence means to a specific enterprise. This definition provides a secure basis for sound management decisions, e.g. on where and how to invest in the strengths of the current business model and how to prioritize new options.

Success comes from within, but a company’s market position is determined by outside opinion. End-to-end processes take this fact into consideration, and that’s why they reinforce the positive role of your company as a partner in the industrial ecosystem.

To understand the benefits that can be gained from this and other strengths of end-to-end processes, one can look at product creation as an example business process.

End-to-End Processes: Examples of Improved Product Creation

Seamless, IT-supported end-to-end processes offer a digital dividend that benefits product development in many ways – during ongoing business operation, but also via long-term use of data. 

Notably, such a digital dividend can only be reaped if and when the business has implemented an end-to-end product lifecycle management scheme, i.e. a “big picture” for PLM. 

Once this is in place, the business can establish harmonized, flexibly controlled and optimally efficient workflows, and it can automate time-consuming manual operations. This boosts productivity by shortening cycles and abbreviating time to market.

End-to-end processes benefit the core objective – profitability – as well as the principle of sustainable product creation in a wide variety of ways – directly in the form of resource-optimized products and production, or via digital traceability which helps optimize reuse of materials (recycling). And, an increasingly pertinent aspect, it helps businesses track measurable sustainability goals like end-to-end carbon emissions.

How economy and ecology can be combined may be understood by looking at the continual improvement process, which benefits considerably from digitally supported continuity. The results of a process are collated and evaluated, and this information is used to make improvements during the next cycle so that optimum-quality products can be realized more sustainably. Maximum connectivity of data and information relevant to product creation also provides an ideal basis for early (and therefore cost-effective) corrective action. 

Another example of how the end-to-end principle benefits product creation is collaboration: It establishes clear interfaces with other business processes within and beyond the business, and provides data and information that meaningfully support collaborative ventures. Because collaboration always remains strategically focused on the overall goal, digital workflows benefit all stakeholders.

Potentials inherent in end-to-end processes
  • they foster strategic market orientation throughout in the organization
  • they enable operational excellence
  • they optimize value addition

How end-to-end processes benefit your business

Strategy Compass

Translating your business strategy into end-to-end processes gives you a foundation for growth prioritization and secure decision-making. 

Optimum Collaboration

Consistent customer focus and effective collaboration give you processes that satisfy modern standards – and vice versa.

A Sharper Competitive Edge

You react flexibly to market developments and stay a step ahead of the competition at all times.

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Definition: What exactly is an end-to-end process?

A Metaprocess and its characteristics

The term “end-to-end process” signifies a bundle of characteristics grouped under a quality criterion heading. One can therefore speak of a metaprocess with a defined framework and specific structures. 
End-to-end processes are distinguished by the fact that they are derived directly from the business goals of a company and embedded within its value streams. And the overarching value streams always begin and end with the customers’ requirements. 

End-to-end processes successfully regulate interfaces between business units and with entities beyond the company because they are defined from a target perspective instead of a silo viewpoint. All stakeholders pursue a common strategy and understand how they contribute (roles, tasks, governance).

Standardization of workflows ensure that target attainment can be measured and analyzed. 

Within the entire value chain of an enterprise, there may be a multitude of processes that have end-to-end characteristics. These might include the product creation process in its entirety, sub-processes such as the engineering process and the manufacturing process, as well as additional product lifecycle management workflows like the change management process. 

Quality criteria of digital continuity
  • Implementation of the end-to-end principle
  • Integrated solutions for interfaces
  • Joint target-setting and clear structures 
  • Data and information consistency and availability

Structural IT characteristics

Information technology supports and integrates the entire process sequence and resolves interface issues among participating systems. Seamless connectivity between IT systems and applications ensures uninterrupted data transfer, data usage and communication between the different stages of the process – in other words, data consistency throughout the process. Ideally, suitable applications support efficient task handling along the entire process workflow.

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Introducing and digitally implementing end-to-end processes

Starting at the business end

Any transformation aimed at achieving end-to-end processes has to start with your business fundamentals and your strategic orientation. In other words, with your business model, your business goals, and your market strategy. They tell you how you should prioritize specific business processes or value streams, and what (sub-)goals are particularly important to your success. 

As in all digitalization projects, this approach is rooted in the understanding that transformation is not just a matter of implementing IT and software: The transformation must be driven by your strategy. This is particularly important in the case of end-to-end processes because they aim to deliver the methodology for achieving your goals. 

Transformation: Your Management Tasks
  • Prioritization by goals and business significance 
  • Leadership and management, right through to completion 
  • Promoting motivation and reorientation

Anticipating the obstacles

Even a business with highly successful market orientation may find that business processes and sub-processes are not always linked perfectly. The reasons often lie in a legacy of silo-based thinking and purely sequential approaches. 

Processes develop along well-trodden communication paths, and that’s not always the most efficient approach for a business to take. Moreover, it may inhibit agile relationships across unit boundaries or hamper cross-board management strategies. 

Another observation: Anyone who takes a fresh look at their processes will see that they often fail to take sufficient account of outside perspectives, because traditional business activity simply didn’t require it. Customers, market partners and the wider public now play a different role vis a vis your enterprise. 

Other typical obstacles on your path to end-to-end processes result from workaround approaches and standalone solutions. These rarely serve to increase overall efficiency, and they require a lot of work before an audit.

The same observations apply to the status quo of digitalization generally. A full product lifecycle involves a wide variety of platforms and software applications, which all have their strengths and will still be needed in future. But promoting the end-to-end quality of processes means that your interfaces must ensure data and information consistency across all phases of your product lifetimes. To achieve this, you will need to eliminate standalone IT solutions which cannot be integrated into your new end-to-end approach. And, of course, any remaining fundamental digitalization gaps will need to be addressed.

Planning transformation and setting milestones

As we have outlined, a successful transformation project begins with your strategic goals and a prioritization based on how important they are to your business. Once you have identified a certain business process or sub-process, you need to examine the status quo: What are your risks and weaknesses, and where do your optimization potentials lie? Defining these lets you derive your specific transformation tasks, and your initial focus must be on those measures which offer the greatest contribution to your success in achieving end-to-end processes. 

Pursued correctly, this approach gives you a manageable project that can be realized in a medium-scale enterprise context. Your project plan should include a series of milestones, each of which already has a positive influence on your business success. This keeps you from trying to take on too many changes at once, and it boosts your team’s motivation and acceptance levels. Each step will make your business better.

Taking the Next Step

End-to-end processes help you achieve operational excellence and are key to boosting your competitiveness. Your organization will become even better at meeting customer requirements and positioning itself as a relevant player within the industrial ecosystem. Results-focused collaboration and cooperation within and beyond your business are set on a sound foundation that stays focused on your overarching strategy at all times.

The transformation to end-to-end data and information flows along business-critical processes raise the digital maturity level of your organization, giving you resilience during the polycrisis era as well as the right foundation for exploiting the many opportunities that lie in new technologies and market trends. Plan the successful future of your business now – we are here to support you.

How end-to-end processes benefit your business

Consistent, optimized digital processes reinforce your strengths and boost your business success.

Generate new opportunities for your business

Profit from new business models and innovative technology.

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