Real Time Enterprise as a Platform of Support Management Systems

In many business areas, competition relates to time – quick response is a key element of success, minimizing costs and maintaining excellent quality of operations (Cundius and Alt, 2017).

The key issue for organizations in maintaining a competitive advantage is the organizational ability to quickly detect and manage important business events that turn into opportunities and threats (Park, et al., 2017).

Currently, one of the basic business needs is the use of tools enabling access to critical information at the right time and place. This involves identifying new business opportunities, minimizing delays in main business processes, speed and quality of decisions made, improving customer relationships, avoiding failures and improving flexibility, as well as increasing return on investment and improving employee productivity at every level of the organization.

IT is one of the most important factors that can determine organizational capabilities to cope with environmental turbulence (George, et al., 2016). Thanks to the integration of internal and external data, effective information analysis and communication between business partners, RTE can operate extremely quickly.

Real-time information processing is also the central element of the Smart Factory in the Industry 4.0 concept (Herrmann, 2018) and its important element – the cyber-physical system (CPS), where industrial machines exchange information in real time with other machines or connected objects, controlling mutual actions. This revolutionary idea is based on IT, planning and controlling the company's resources in real time, controlling production, carrying out planning, connecting systems, sensors, actuators, robotics and so on (Dachs, et al., 2019), fully integrating suppliers and customers and covering the entire value chain.

In an ideal RTE model (Snabe, et al., 2009): 1)

Information flows smoothly inside and outside the enterprise, without barriers;

The speed at which new opportunities emerge or new products and services are introduced is steadily increasing over time in many industries not only in high-tech industries, but also in non-high-tech industries (Park, et al., 2020). Examples of industries and their real-time processes are presented in Table 1.

Summarizing the above information, it can be stated that at the basic level, IT solutions for RTE should enable: 1)

Real-time monitoring of the company and its environment;

3.1.1

Real-time monitoring

In business today, many values that were once viewed as static are now becoming increasingly volatile. Despite this, however, many day-to-day business transactions are not effectively monitored and supervised (Yousef, et al., 2018).

Efficient management is possible only when we have good quality information about the organization and its environment (Kisielnicki, 2017).

Monitoring the operation of an organization in real time is one element in the pursuit of a real-time enterprise. Organizations respond to economic events at different speeds and with varying levels of complexity. The simplest solution is to get reports informing about what happened. More complex queries allow you to pinpoint the cause of an event. Forecasting requires analytical models and constant data refreshing to be informed about the current state of the organization. At the most advanced level, the organization monitors itself and its surroundings on an ongoing basis and, depending on the events, takes predefined actions. There is therefore no significant delay between the incident and the organization's response. The premise of RTE is to react at a rate of fractions of a second, which exceeds the human ability to obtain and process information, analyze and answer it.

Real-time monitoring of the organization and its environment is related to, among others organization's ability to detect critical events, report, make decisions and provide excellent business insight. It allows you to track the status of processes and applications, monitor the most important business measures (i.e., KPI), detect and act on business opportunities. Sources of such information may be business IT systems, that is, ERP, BI, CRM, SCM, MES, SCADA, measurement tools, RFID gates, IoT objects, etc.

Continuous measurement of the organization's activities and immediate access to key business indicators (Tank, 2015) is possible thanks to IT solutions. In this case, the acquisition of measurement data and their transformation into useful information in real time becomes a simpler and more automated process.

Fig. 1 shows exemplary enterprise systems used in real-time monitoring, the central element of which is the management cockpit, fed with data from BI & Real Time BI.

BI and Real-time BI receives data from:

ERP and business partners’ systems integrated with ERP,

CRM, which with the help of Artificial Intelligence supports many channels of contact with the client,

SCM, MES and SCADA connected, among others with elements of industrial automation, IoT or RFID readers.

In order not to complicate the image, possible integrations between ERP, CRM, SCM and other such systems were omitted.

Figure 1

The issue of precise monitoring is related to the generation of very large amounts of data (Song, et al., 2017). They create the so-called a stream of events that can be processed in real time (Zhang, et al., 2018) that can be analyzed with complex event processing (CEP) solutions detecting in real time situations relevant or critical for the monitored area (Garro, et al., 2016; Macià, et al. 2016).

Processing real-time information from sensors enables continuous monitoring of almost every link in the supply chain, from product design to raw material purchasing, production, transportation, storage, distribution and after-sales service. It also allows for the provision of real-time services (Lai, et al., 2018) or the provision of information on the condition of machines and devices (Nel and Jooste, 2018) for remote access customers.

Data sources can also be RFID tags or IoT objects. Sometimes this requires a detailed definition of events (Patri, et al., 2016).

In many business sectors, there are real-time or near-real-time business processes supported by a number of IT systems integrated in various ways.

It seems impossible to function RTE without the support of IT technology. Nevertheless, organizational changes must be carried out in the company, which will be “consolidated” by IT.

The goal is, among others, addressing activities that generate more value (Hongren, et al., 2015) and enable optimization of business processes, for example, based on defining Lean goals, preparing a time course analysis or modifying the qualifications of specialists.

In order to achieve the goals set for RTE, among others, implementation, modernization and integration of various IT systems. It can be checked that the IT system being the source of RTE will be the system of systems (Hofman and Bastiaansen, 2014).

The use of a rapidly developing domain – Artificial Intelligence (Pan, 2016; Makridakis, 2017) – may be of key importance for the implementation of the RTE concept. At a higher organizational level, artificial intelligence can be seen in terms of support for the automation of business processes, gaining insight through data analysis, and actively engaging customers and employees (Davenport and Ronanki, 2018).

In the literature on the subject, the following RTE business areas can be identified for which AI can be applied: (e.g., Brynjolfsson and McAffee, 2017; Davenport and Ronanki, 2018; Dirican, 2015; Kolbjørnsrud, et al. 2016; Wua, et al., 2017; Zhang and Chen, 2017):

customer service,

Preparation of a comprehensive IT system for information processing in RTE is a complicated matter. Based on the analysis of the literature on the subject and own research, it is possible to present a certain set of conditions supporting the creation of an IT system for RTE, which is a type of management support systems platform. This applies to the following areas, which will be discussed further: 1)

Implementation of new or development of existing IT systems in the core areas of the business, that is, finance, production, sale and distribution, and supplies;

Enterprises to operate in specific business areas use a number of IT systems, including ERP for core back office activities, CRM for customer relationship management, SCM for transport, mobile and smart devices. All this information technology is used to change and enhance business processes, customer relationships and the ways to innovate produces and services, thus transforming competitive landscapes in all economic sectors (George, et al., 2016).

For RTE, these systems: 1)

They support the implementation of all or part of business processes;

Hence, for the implementation of RTE, it seems important to analyze the possibility of supporting the required real-time functionalities by the existing enterprise systems or, possibly, the implementation of new IT systems. Examples of determinants regarding implementation of new or development of existing IT systems are listed in Table 2

Those business processes that are implemented in various IT systems often require information exchange and interpersonal interaction. Continuity of process implementation is associated with the need to integrate information and human resources. Information technologies that enable sharing information and combining resources beyond the boundaries of the enterprise come to the rescue (Song, et al., 2017). For the implementation of RTE, it is important that the integration of IT systems is necessary to reduce delays in the implementation of business processes, access to information and efficient human work.

IT integration is concerned with the seamless interconnection of people, processes and information that can transcend in an environment spanning multiple heterogeneous platforms and protocols as well as multiple access devices (McDonald, 2015).

Thanks to integration, companies’ IT systems can constitute a common IT platform – the foundation for the implementation of RTE activities.

From the business side, striving to integrate the enterprise requires organizing organizational procedures, treating IT as the foundation for their implementation (Cundius and Alt, 2017).

Examples of IT systems/solutions and areas of their business support for the integration of people, information and processes in the context of determinants of IT system for RTE are shown in Table 2.

In order to create an appropriate IT environment implementing the RTE concept, proper management of organizational changes and modification of existing IT solutions is required. Since organizations are social systems, the way they deal with change is essential to the success and survival of a company. Change in the organization is associated with risk and therefore must be effectively managed.

This also includes the use of appropriate human resource management (Yuan, 2016).

Change management can be discussed in the context of the process of continuous review of the direction, structure and capabilities of the organization in order to meet the constantly changing needs of internal and external customers. Proper organizational change covers such areas as (Karnouskos, 2015): employee, leadership, training and development, awards and recognition, culture, policy and IT systems.

In order to ensure the flexibility of business processes and to react quickly to new requirements, it is necessary to implement changes in the IT environment as quickly as possible. Particularly in large organizations, changes bring with them substantial costs of modernization, integration and maintenance of IT systems.

In organizations with a more complex IT architecture, there is an absolute need for central change management – their planning and implementation (e.g., based on ITIL).

It is necessary to ensure proper interoperability of systems and security resulting from the correct implementation of all changes (Kalaimani, 2016). Each implemented IT project is approved in accordance with the procedures for the responsibility of individual employees, documentation, division into development, testing and production works, authorizations, approval, and so on.

Examples of areas and activities related to Change management and business processes continuous improvement in the lights of the Determinants of IT system for RTE are presented in Table 2.

In many cases of IT systems implementation, there is a need to divide the IT project into IT design project and the implementation project itself.

Preparation for implementation (IT design project) of IT solutions for business working in real time requires a coherent vision of the target solution. This can be achieved, for example, using the MUST methodology, which has been developed based on experience from projects in Danish and American organizations (Bødker, et al., 2009).

Thinking and acting from this coherent vision can help the company and its employees deal with post-implementation problems. Issues that often result from IT projects are, for example, the lack of expected improvements, significant budget and schedule overruns, difficulties in implementing tasks using new IT systems or their experience and qualifications (Trocki, 2017).

Such a coherent vision includes suggestions or recommendations for IT systems, work organization and an analysis of the qualifications that users will need to perform their work in a “new”, changed organization using new IT systems. The ongoing information efforts of the implementation team and supporters enable employees and other stakeholders to make their own assessments, which can then be integrated into the final design proposal. The aim is therefore to integrate IT systems and work organization.

The result of preparing a project (design project) is one or more coherent visions to achieve the goals, needs and potentials underlying the company's business and IT strategies (Bødker, et al., 2009). The visions describe the future use of IT, including the functions of IT systems, interfaces, ways of interaction and the technical platform. The vision also takes into account the organization of work and the required qualifications of the staff. This provides a basis for deciding which of the prepared visions for the future use of IT best meets the business goals and user needs for IT support in their work.

Based on MUST methodology, the proposed activities of IT design project for RTE have been listed in the Table 3.

RTE seems to be an increasingly interesting prospect for enterprises from various industries. Hence, the emerging IT requirements from business decision makers. Our research shows that the creation of an IT system enabling RTE operation should be based on the above determinants regarding the integration of people, information and business processes, expansion of the existing management support systems or implementation of new ones, change management and business processes continuous improvement (BPCI) and the appropriate methodology to design or for preparation of the implementation.