ReFLEX Got Green Light by REA
On March 9, 2012, ReFLEX project was successfully reviewed at the premises of the Research Executive Agency (REA) in Brussels, by the Project Officer and the Peer Reviewer with the extensive experience in the domain of information technologies relevant for ReFLEX. All the submitted deliverables were accepted.
The project got a green light to continue to achieving the DoW planned results by the month 24.
The ReFLEX consortium will gather together for the V plenary meeting in May in Skopje to work on integration of the system and early deployment at end-users’.
ReFLEX partners with other research projects, including FutureSME
The ReFLEX project is invited to send participants at the 7th Partner Meeting of FutureSME project. The meeting will be held on 1st and 2nd of March, 2012 in Göteborg, Sweden.
FutureSME is a four year project which aims to develop a new practical business and manufacturing model for SMEs in Europe, which will enable them to compete successfully at a national, European and global level. The project includes 26 partners from Czech Republic, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Turkey, Slovakia, Sweden and the United Kingdom.
The project coordinator is the University of Strathclyde Glasgow and event host is Chalmers University from Sweden. Partners and meeting participants will attend many workshops, such as: Building Managerial Capability, Building Strategic Capability, Building Operational Capability and Building Adaptive Capability.
The opportunities and significance of cooperation between the two projects, FutureSME and ReFLEX, will be considered during a meeting, on mutual satisfaction.
On-site implementation of the ReFLEX components
The on-site implementation and update of the ReFLEX components prerequisites was performed in Invest and Vajomag for the purpose of providing the preconditions and inputs for complex events. The on-site visit and performed activities placed the foundation for the future ReFLEX solution implementation on the SMEs partners’ locations.
The third plenary meeting of the ReFLEX project
The third plenary meeting of the ReFLEX project was held in the period from October 6 – 7, 2011 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The meeting was dedicated to presenting the GIS system in practice, defining simple and complex events from EDM, WMS, CRM and GIS system event sources, as well as identification and definition of the CEP component in the ReFLEX system. Furthermore, the business models of SME partners were presented, as well as the pub/sub broker.
About ReFLEX
Achieving business flexibility is a necessary condition for the business development of SMEs.
ReFLEX project is aiming to perform a research on the new model for the description of dynamic business processes, and to develop an ad hoc BPM solution tailored to the needs of SMEs which will help them REspond more quickly to chaning customer requirements than their larger and less agile competitors, and be more FLEXible, thus providing them with clear benefits and making their smaller size an advantage.
Project Big Picture
To thrive in today's competitive market midsize organizations need to be agile, responding quickly to changing market conditions and exceeding customers' demands. Unlike larger companies, midsize organizations can't lean on globally recognized brands: a lost customer, or a missed opportunity to recruit a new customer, may never be recouped. So they need to find unique ways of differentiating their offerings. With limited resources, midsize organizations must struggle to adapt to changing market conditions, whether these are reduced time to market, increased expected service levels, or price-cutting.
By remaining flexible midsize organizations can react faster to changing customer requirements than their larger, less agile competitors. In fact, by being smaller (i.e. easier manageable), they could afford themselves more dynamics in executing the business, which enhances their responsiveness on the highly-changing business environment.
Therefore, achieving business flexibility is a necessary condition for the business development of SMEs.
Business process management (BPM) is a class of software that treats processes as assets that directly contribute to enterprise performance by driving operational excellence and business agility. The goal of BPM is to drive consistency and efficiency of operations by modelling and automating an organization's core business processes - expense reporting, employee on-boarding, benefit claims processing and more. These processes are static and structured, making them easy to document, model and automate. In that context, BPM excellences on modelling “best work practices” in companies that helps them preserve capital, identify threats and minimize risks.
The technology development in last years is creating new opportunities for realizing the SME’s flexibility. Especially important is enabling gathering much more information from a running business process or information relevant for its execution that can support their ability to be responsive.
There are two main trends:
1) expansion of the application of GPS signals and RFID sensors and
2) increased usage of the public information streams on the web, like discussion forums.
In a way this information enables the reaction on undefined changes in the right way and in the right (real) time. Indeed, the response time on changes is decreasing dramatically, what has created an enabling environment for the dynamic business process management.
The dynamic BPM in this context means that the business processes will be aware of the changes in the (external/internal) environment and will be able to change/adapt themselves accordingly (but in an not-previously-planned, i.e. ad-hoc way) in order to keep the business process running well.
Project Vision
The ReFLEX project will revolutionize the ways of dynamic business process management and provide the methodology and sustainable business models which will enable participating SME's to gain competitive advantage by being flexible and responsive to changes.