Increasing efficiency and productivity in an ...

MBA Thesis in e-business

Increasing efficiency and productivity in an international research organization with e-business solutions - Technology-driven process improvements at CERN.

University: Department of Business Administration, University of Gävle, Sweden Case organization: European Organization for Nuclear Research, Geneva, Switzerland Students: Niklas Olsson, [email protected] David Widegren, [email protected] HIG Thesis No: 08-05-DDK EDMS Doc. No: 596518

MBA thesis in e-business

Olsson & Widegren, 2005

Executive summary This report is the outcome of a master thesis project carried out during autumn 2004 and spring 2005 as the final part of the MBA program in e-business at University of Gävle. The project was done at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland, and its purpose was to see how the case organization could streamline its business processes by a more efficient usage of its information systems infrastructure. CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the largest centre for particle physics in the world and has a large number of both technical and administrative information systems in use within the organization. For this project, two specific processes were studied more in detail in order to limit the scope of the investigations: the purchasing process for orders between 200.000 and 750.000 CHF and the materials management processes. To gather information about these business processes and their related information systems at CERN, internal documentation was studied and interviews with key persons were conducted. An important advantage in this work was that one of the authors is employed at the case organization and the other one not. This meant easier access to information while still keeping a fresh external view. Since no existing model or method for business process improvements seemed to suite the authors’ intentions in this project, a new model for Technology-Driven Process Improvements, TDPI was developed. The main goal of this model is to provide a step-by-step procedure for investigating how a better and more efficient use of information systems can help improving business processes. The TDPI model was applied on the two processes that were studied more in detail and a number of possible improvements were proposed. For the purchasing process, it became for example clear that some documents like Market Surveys, Invitations to Tender and Price Enquires were stored manually in three different document management systems. To avoid this, an integration of the different systems into a Common Documentation Platform was proposed. For the materials management processes, three more or less isolated groups of information systems were identified: technical information systems, administrative information systems and the inventory management system. In order to improve this situation, it was suggested to create an organizationwide Fixed Asset Inventory by linking all existing tools related to management of physical assets into a consolidated assets database. The overall conclusions of the project were that the TDPI method proved to be useful in the efforts of improving processes triggered by a more efficient and integrated use of information systems. A new integrated information infrastructure was proposed and a new organization for its support was recommended. This proposal included the assignment of a Chief Information Officer at CERN as well as a reorganization of three existing groups providing information systems within the organization. A number of areas for future investigation were also pointed out like e.g. a review of the current purchasing procedures in order to make them more adapted to the e-business era, the use of commercial catalogues for suppliers and benchmarking against other international organizations.

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Table of contents 1

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Introduction .................................................................................................................................. 4 1.1 CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research........................................................... 4 1.2 About the thesis...................................................................................................................... 7 1.3 Purpose and main incentives.................................................................................................. 7 1.4 Objectives .............................................................................................................................. 8 1.5 Scope...................................................................................................................................... 8 Method........................................................................................................................................... 9 2.1 General approach ................................................................................................................... 9 2.2 Selection of method ............................................................................................................... 9 2.3 Literature studies.................................................................................................................. 10 2.4 Conducting interviews ......................................................................................................... 10 2.5 Neutrality and validity of information sources .................................................................... 11 Applying e-business in an organization .................................................................................... 12 3.1 Theoretical approach............................................................................................................ 12 3.2 Definition of the e-business concept.................................................................................... 12 3.3 Business Process Modelling ................................................................................................ 13 3.4 Business Process Reengineering.......................................................................................... 15 3.5 Technology-Driven Process Improvements......................................................................... 17 3.6 The TDPI model explained .................................................................................................. 19 3.7 E-business in public sector................................................................................................... 21 E-business at CERN ................................................................................................................... 23 4.1 Strategies today and in the past............................................................................................ 23 4.2 Incentives and driving forces ............................................................................................... 23 4.3 Existing e-business tools at CERN ...................................................................................... 24 4.4 Administrative information systems .................................................................................... 24 4.5 Archiving systems................................................................................................................ 28 4.6 Technical information systems ............................................................................................ 29 Technology-driven process improvements at CERN .............................................................. 33 5.1 Introduction to purchasing at CERN.................................................................................... 33 5.2 The purchasing processes .................................................................................................... 33 5.3 Introduction to materials management at CERN ................................................................. 38 5.4 The materials management processes .................................................................................. 39 Conclusions and recommendations for future work ............................................................... 46 6.1 General conclusions ............................................................................................................. 46 6.2 A new information management infrastructure ................................................................... 48 6.3 A new organization for information management support .................................................. 49 6.4 Recommended areas for future work ................................................................................... 50

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1 Introduction In this first chapter the background, scope and problem settings of the thesis are presented. The reader will get a brief introduction to the case organization and a first glance at the specific questions that this report aims at providing some answers to.

1.1 CERN, European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is the world's largest particle physics centre. The Organization provides the international scientific community with facilities to probe the fundamental structure of matter and, in particular, it builds and operates particle accelerators. The centre is located on the Swiss-Franco border just outside Geneva, Switzerland. Founded in 1954, the laboratory was one of Europe's first post-war joint ventures and is today supported by 20 European Member States 1 . The international collaboration of the Organization goes however far beyond the borders of Europe and includes today also countries and international organisations that are attached as Observer States 2 or as contributing non-Member States 3 . CERN is right now carrying out one of the largest engineering projects in Europe, designing and building the world’s largest and most powerful particle accelerator – The Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The LHC will create protons-protons and ions-ions head-on collisions at higher energies than ever achieved before. This will allow scientists to penetrate even further into the structure of matter and recreate the conditions prevailing in the early universe, just fractions of a second after the "Big Bang".

Figure 1, Aerial view of CERN and the future LHC in front of Lake Geneva and the Alps. 4

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The Member States are as of December 2004: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom 2 The Observer States are as of December 2002: The European Commission, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, India, UNESCO and the USA 3 The non-Member States are as of December 2002: Algeria, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Cyprus, Estonia, Georgia, Iceland, Iran, Ireland, Mexico, Morocco, Pakistan, Peru, Romania, Serbia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan and the Ukraine. 4 LHC Project Management, The LHC Project Home Page, http://www.cern.ch/lhc

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The new accelerator, which is planned to be operational in 2007, will be installed in the 27 kilometre long circular tunnel located 100 meter below ground that was used by its predecessor, the Large Electron-Positron collider, LEP, between 1989 and 2000. Whereas it is CERN that builds and operates the accelerators, it is the physicists from around the world that build the particle detectors. The largest LHC detectors are as high as a six-floor building, weigh more than 12.500 tons and are being built by teams of almost 2000 scientist each. In total, CERN’s research programme involves around 6500 researchers from 500 institutes in 80 countries.

Figure 2, The ATLAS experiment - one of the four LHC detectors 5

Even though the mission of CERN is to perform particle physics research, these efforts do also push technology to its very limits and have over the years generated a large number of spin-off technologies. The World Wide Web was for example invented at CERN in order to find a solution to the growing needs for communication within the research community. Medical imaging, computer chip manufacture and contraband detection are other examples of technologies that have benefited from technology advances generated from the physics research at CERN. In 2003 CERN had a permanent staff of 2507 people and 6650 visiting scientists that normally stay between a few months and a few years to work at the organization. 6 It is also important to note that among the CERN staff, only a small minority of people is actually employed as research physicists. The vast majority of the personnel consists in fact of scientists, engineers and technical and administrative staff as shown in figure 3.

Figure 3, Distribution of the CERN staff. 7 5

ATLAS Outreach unit, 2003, http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/documentation/EDUC/atlas.html CERN Annual Report 2003, http://www.cern.ch/User/AnnualReport2003.pdf 7 Based on figures from the CERN Annual Report 2003. 6

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CERN is financed by contributions from its member states and the total budget for 2003 was approximately 1.1 billion CHF. 8 9

Figure 4, Distribution of the 2003 budget. 10

Organizational wise, CERN consists of 7 Departments that then in turn are broken down into groups and sections. In addition to this a number of special projects and support units exist. A brief overview of the structure of the Organization can be found in Figure 5.

Figure 5, An overview of the organization of CERN. 11

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1 CHF = ~5.9 SEK (as of May 2005) CERN Annual Report 2003, op. cit. 10 Based on figures from the CERN Annual Report 2003. 9

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1.2 About the thesis This report is the outcome of a master thesis project carried out during autumn 2004 and spring 2005 as the final part of the Master of Business Administration, MBA, program in e-business at University of Gävle. This MBA program is a post-graduate education with a focus on implementation and development of electronic business processes. The education consists of six different courses and one final master thesis project. In total this corresponds to 40 Swedish university credits, which is equal to one academic year of full-time studies. As the last step of the MBA program a master thesis project should be done in an organization of the student’s choice. This project, which must correspond to at least 10 weeks of full-time work per student, should include and give training in the following: -

Identifying, describing, analyzing and solving problems concerning the implementation and development of electronic business processes in an organization. Gaining experience in selecting and applying common methods for gathering and evaluating both new and existing information. Managing a project and presenting the results in an appropriate way with respect to target group, goals, models, methods and conclusions.

The project should focus on the preparation, implementation or development of electronic business processes in either a governmental organization or in a commercial company. For this particular thesis we, David Widegren and Niklas Olsson, decided to work together on a common project in order to be able to cover a more extensive subject. We both know each other very well from our previous engineering studies at KTH, Stockholm, and saw that our different professional experiences and interests could be complementary for this project. More information about the background of the authors can be found in Appendix A. The selection of case organization was based on the fact that David is working at CERN and that it would be interesting to see how e-business concepts could be applied in a type of organization that normally is not associated to this type of activities.

1.3 Purpose and main incentives The purpose of the thesis project was to perform an investigation and prepare a proposal to how the existing business processes and working methods at CERN can be improved and made more efficient using modern information technology and applying new e-business concepts. From the CERN management, there is today a strong interest in investigating the possibilities of streamlining the existing procedures within the organization. The main reason for this is the decision from the member states in the CERN council to decrease the number of permanent staff while more or less keeping the current program of work. In parallel to this CERN has been forced to operate with tighter project budgets than ever before. This all led to that the newly assigned Director General, when arriving at CERN in January 2004, put a new more streamlined organization in place notably by merging the 13 existing Divisions into 7 bigger Departments. He has also clearly pointed out that continuous improvements are necessary.

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Simplified representation of illustration provided by the Director Generals Office 2004, http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/Content/Chapters/AboutCERN/WhatIsCERN/Structure/Structure-en.html

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Even though large organizational changes recently have been carried out at CERN, there are still areas that have not been deeply investigated in terms of possible improvements of efficiency and productivity. One of them is the overall information infrastructure for administrative and technical tasks. The most likely explanation to why such an investigation has not been done is probably due to the fact that there is no unit or management position in the organization that has been assigned this mandate and responsibility.

1.4 Objectives The overall objective of this study was consequently to investigate if and how such a lacking central coordination of corporate information systems could be improved and what the possible advantages could be. This effort did therefore include a study of how the existing tools at CERN could be linked together in order to improve the manageability and flow of information – mainly within the organization and but also at external contacts. In parallel to this, an analysis of possibilities coming out of introducing new information systems to replace today’s manual procedures was also done. Some of the key issues in this work were the comparisons between the solutions at CERN and other available information systems, best practices and e-business trends. These assessments did not only cover functionality related matters, but considered also the cost and quality aspects of the information management infrastructure. The main objectives of the work were the following: -

Preparation of a map of the information flows in the organization. Performing an inventory of the existing main information management systems. Comparison of the usage of information systems at CERN with best-practice and e-business trends, including functionality, information quality and costs. Identification of possible interfaces between the different information systems. Proposal of a strategy for the future information management at CERN.

1.5 Scope The focus of the investigations was set on the information systems used to support activities within the technical and administrative infrastructure at CERN. This is obviously a vast area of research and in order to be able deliver some more concrete results as an outcome of this study, we narrowed down the scope even further to cover two main processes: − −

The purchasing process for orders between 200.000 and 750.000 CHF. The materials management processes within the organization.

These particular processes were selected since we believe they form representative examples of activities at CERN that include both administrative and technical processes and information systems. It should also be clearly stated that information systems and procedures related to the physics research at the case organization were not considered at all in these studies.

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2 Method In the second chapter the reader will be presented both the general approach and a more detailed description of the methods for collecting and analyzing information that have been applied for this project.

2.1 General approach The general approach for carrying out this case study is described in the following slightly simplified workflow: 1. Studying state-of-the-art literature and documentation in the domain. 2. Writing a summary including the most important information from the literature study. 3. Studying existing internal documentation on this and related subjects produced at CERN. This also includes other academic publications such as reports from other M.Sc., MBA, or Ph.D. students. 4. Preparing draft work-flow diagrams of selected processes in the organization. 5. Conducting interviews with people working with or within the studied organization. 6. Analyzing and processing of the collected empirical material. 7. Preparing and documenting a proposal for improvements. In addition to acquiring new information, an important source of information and ideas was the knowledge and professional experience acquired over the years at our different positions respectively.

2.2 Selection of method Studies are normally qualified as either quantitative or qualitative investigations. Both alternatives are based on the procedure of formulating a question in a certain defined domain and, for a qualitative investigation, to draw up a hypothesis of a corresponding answer. The hypothesis is then tested and validated by carrying out the investigation. A qualitative investigation may give the impression of being more disorganised than a quantitative one. For example, to test the hypothesis in a quantitative investigation, a certain selection is made. In a qualitative investigation however, it is not always possible to decide up front what will be part of the selection. Often one needs to start with interviews and observations, and from there make new selections. The difference between quantitative and qualitative research is not always clear, and the definition varies depending on who is giving the answer. In some way or the other, all research is quantitative, because anything can be counted – even verbal responses during interviews. Moreover, all research is qualitative because even the firmest of these responses may conceal a variety of meanings. According to Dennis List at Audience Dialogue 12 , the real difference between qualitative and quantitative is not so much the method, but rather the researcher’s approach. We believe that even though it is possible to find pieces of both approaches in any research, there methods that are more quantitative, and others that are more qualitative. For this study we decided to go for a qualitative approach in our investigations. The reason for this is that we intended to look into why and how CERN could benefit from applying e-business concepts to a wider extent than today. We did also conduct interviews with people working with and within the CERN organization. The content of these interviews were not easy to quantify since the issues 12

List Dennis, Quantitative or Qualitative Research, Audience Dialogue, 2004, http://www.audiencedialogue.org/qualiquant.html, 2004-06-13

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discussed are related to business processes, how they performed and how they could be improved. This was another reason for selecting the qualitative approach. A potential disadvantage of using a qualitative approach is the difficulties of drawing general conclusions from a specific case. Still, in qualitative case studies it is sometimes possible to compensate this by using related theories as a basis for generalizing the results. 13 In this particular case study, we did not aim at defining general e-business solutions applicable for any arbitrary organization. Instead we focused on how electronic business methods and modern information technology could be beneficial for CERN. Nevertheless, we strongly believe that our overall approach and applied models can be useful also for other organizations in a similar environment.

2.3 Literature studies Our literature studies started with focusing on what has been done before and tried to highlight how this thesis might fill a possible knowledge gap. During the literature studies we constantly aimed at taking the following questions into consideration 14 : • • • • •

How did the researcher conceptualize the problem? What were the assumptions? How is the research relevant to this study? How were constructs measured? How is it different to this study?

Besides external literature, we obviously examined internal material originating from CERN employees, students and other people that have been in contact or working with the organization. The literature review also outlined the instruments and methods used and more concretely set the boundary for our research. Eventually, as stated above, it points out why we believe it was interesting and useful to conduct this study. The structure of our literature studies was: • • • •

General background and introduction. A review of past and current literature related to our research purpose. This comprises a clarification of the purpose of our study, and the general hypothesis. Theory. This part outlines relevant theories that affect our research. Instruments. A review of the literature on the instruments and methods we use in our study. We will present our reasons for choosing instruments opposed to other alternatives. Summary. By summarizing the literature study we hope to prove the need for and advantages of carrying out this work.

2.4 Conducting interviews In order to gather information at CERN, we performed interviews with people working within the organization. This included both existing and potential e-business users as well as e-business providers at CERN. The interviews were focused on certain selected business processes, how they performed and questions about how they could be improved.

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Yin R. K., Case study research - design and methods, Sage Publications, 1994 Fenton, Paul, Literature reviews and thesis structure, Massey University, http://auckland.massey.ac.nz/dept/ss/documents/literature_reviews_workshop_2_notes.pdf, 2004-06-14 14

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It is obvious that the art of interviewing involves much more than just asking questions and taking notes. Still, we did not plan to conduct interviews using any particularly advanced techniques concerning social and communication skills. The reason for this was both due to the rather concrete topic of the thesis but also linked to our inexperience in performing interviews. During the interviews we primarily considered what was being said as the main contents. Even though we are fully aware of that there are more aspects to explore in an interview, this is the easiest component to study as novices in the field. It is also important to remember that if the interviewee is an expert on some particular topic or possesses some special skill or experience, his or her responses may be “facts” or “opinions” depending on how one look at it. Without dwelling too far into the art of interviewing we will be looking for the “overall picture”. What was the interviewee trying to say and how did the statements made interrelate? What were the contradictions and consistencies? There might for example be reasons for the interviewees to present to us a somewhat idealized picture of the present situation. In our search for the “big picture” we considered the following questions while examining our collection of interview data 15 : • • • • • •

Does the interview data support or contradict our thesis? Did what the interviewee said support our literature studies? Did what he/she said contradict the literature studies? What might this mean? Did what he/she said add new dimensions to what other interviewees said? What was the “big picture” of what each interviewee said and how does it relate to our thesis? How can “big picture” of the different interviews be compared, and does this reveal any insights concerning our thesis?

Our questions were be based on a standard set of questions and topics prepared in advance for practical reasons but also to get a more homogenous information basis. A basic set of questions can be found in Appendix C.

2.5 Neutrality and validity of information sources Since a large set of the empirical data in this case study comes from interviews and internal documentation at CERN it is important to take into account how the data has been acquired. The answers from interviewed people are obviously very much depending on how the questions are formulated and perhaps even interpersonal relations between the interviewer and the interviewee. We are aware of the potential problem of getting information about criticalities and issues in the organizational procedures from people responsible for them. Still we believe that CERN, as an international non-profit research organization, has an organizational culture of being more open and transparent than most commercial companies. We have nevertheless done our very best not to overlook this potential problem. Another significant advantage in this respect is that one of the students in fact is employed at the studied organization whereas the other one is from a completely different environment. This will helped us to get information from the insider’s perspective while still keeping a fresh external view.

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Suler John, Using Interviews in Research, Ryder University, 2004, http://www.rider.edu/~suler/interviews.html, 2004-06-14

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3 Applying e-business in an organization In this third chapter, the theoretical background and definitions in the field of e-business will be described. The reader will also get introduced to the authors’ own definitions of e-business and the model developed for technology-driven process improvements in an organization.

3.1 Theoretical approach In order to be able to carry out this project, three main theoretical fields were identified in which further literature studies and investigation were done. The theoretical part of the report is therefore based on definitions, theories and models linked to the following three domains: -

Fundamental definitions of the concept of e-business Theories and standards about how to model business processes. Theories and models concerning improvements of business processes by applying e-business concepts.

For all of these topics, a limited number of theories are described and explained further in the following sub-chapters. This is done by referring to, quoting and analyzing leading authors, analysts and other market actors in each domain respectively. In addition to the three theoretical topics, we also added a short section about state-of-the art usage of e-business in the public sector since we realized that this also would be interesting and useful for the following phases of our project.

3.2 Definition of the e-business concept Since the main goal of this project is to see how e-business concepts can be used and improved in order to increase efficiency and productivity in an organization, we found it essential to start with a clear definition of the e-business concept. This includes both an overview of the most commonly known definitions as well as our own ideas and conclusions. It was in fact IBM that originally introduced the term e-business as part of the largest advertising campaign ever launched by the company. In these marketing efforts IBM wanted to show that ebusiness was something that did not focus on the technology itself but rather on the optimisation of business processes with the support of information technology. 16 Many companies found both the concept and the term e-business most useful and it is today no longer only associated with IBM. Before continuing, it might be useful to explain the difference between e-business and another related and commonly used concept, e-commerce. Turban and his co-authors have spent quite some efforts on sorting out the terminology in this field and in their definition of electronic commerce; they explain ecommerce as an emerging concept that describes the process of buying and selling or exchanging of products, services and information via computer networks including the Internet 17 . E-business is then, still according to Turban, simply a broader definition of electronic commerce, not just including buying and selling but also servicing customers, collaborating with business partners, and conducting electronic transactions within an organization. They also quote Lou Gerstner, who today is a former CEO of IBM and once describe the new concept with the following words: “Ebusiness is all about cycle time, speed, globalization, enhanced productivity, reaching new customers and sharing knowledge across institutions for competitive advantage”. 16

Fredholm, Peter., Elektroniska affärer, Studentlitteratur, Lund, 2000 Turban, Lee, King, Chung, Electronic Commerce – a managerial perspective, Prentice Hall International, New Jersey, USA, 2000 17

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Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian have however a more pragmatic opinion about e-business. They do not see it as a prophecy for the next decade, but do rather draw the parallels with what happened a hundred years ago when the industrial giants were formed. 18 Using the infrastructure of the emerging electricity and telephone networks, these industrialists transformed the economy, just as today’s organizations are drawing on computer and communication networks to transform the world’s economy. The authors’ conclusion is nevertheless that even though technology evolves, the durable economic principles must stay valid in the new e-business environment. Another definition of e-business is given by Peter Fredholm, who describes e-business as a way of establishing contacts between sellers and buyers on a market, regardless of if it is business-to-business (B2B), business-to-consumer (B2C) or consumer-to-consumer (C2C) relations that are being considered. 19 Further on, he expands his thoughts to include business process and strategic rationalizing into the e-business concept. Fredholm also clearly states that technology often gets too much attention when talking about electronic business. In his definition of the concept, he is therefore clearly pointing out that e-business consists of three cornerstones – namely; business models, technology and organization.

Figure 6, Fredholm´s three e-business cornerstones. 20

Our own perception of e-business is not so far from what Lou Gerstner describes, in what we see as one of the most complete definitions of e-business. We would however like to explicitly widen the scope a little and not only talking about digital information exchanges between two counterparts when setting a transaction, but also including all automated business processes within an organization. This would then naturally not only comprise administrative systems, but also technical systems and all other systems that contain vital pieces of information – integrated in the digital information exchange or not.

3.3 Business Process Modelling We believe that the first step of efficient problem solving is to establish an unambiguous description of the actual problem. For this case study we did therefore start by preparing a map of some of the current information flows in the organization and, in another view, an inventory of the main information systems used. This work was then forming the basis for all following efforts concerning the investigations of possible improvements using e-business solutions. There are several different ways of documenting information flows but for this project we decided to adopt a process-oriented approach. We also chose to use the definition of a process that Davenport and Short wrote in 1990. 21 According to them a process is a group of related tasks and resources needed to fulfill them, for achieving business results. 18

Shapiro, Varian, Information Rules, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, USA, 1999 Fredholm, Peter., op.cit. s.8 20 Based on an illustration by Fredholm, P, op.cit., s.22 21 Davenport T.H.& Short J.E., The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign, Sloan Management Review p.11-27, 1990 19

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When creating process flowcharts there are also several different notation standards for the objects used to draw the diagrams. Some of the most well known standards are the Business Process Modeling Notation, BPMN, established by the Business Process Management Initiative 22 and the Total Quality Management, TQM, modeling rules that today are part of the ISO standards. For our modeling work we selected the TQM notation, not because it is necessarily better than any other standard, but simply due to the fact that it is a standard we have experience in using and have been working with in the past. A brief overview of the TQM notation standard can be found in Appendix B.

Figure 7, Example of process modelling with the TQM notation.

A common way of proceeding when modeling business processes, is to start drawing up an “as-is” representation of the current situation, in order to be able to both visualize and analyze the current situation. The “as-is” model can then form the input for an analysis which might result in a second modified model. This second model is normally called the “to-be” model, as for example described by Luguna 23 et al and Smith 24 et al. Some people say nevertheless that the “as-is” model should be avoided whenever possible, something that for example Andrews explains in several articles. 25 She warns about the risk of giving too much attention to the current situation in the organization whereas in fact it is the future, “to-be”, solution that is important. Andrews also recommends that if still deciding to create both an “as-is” and a “tobe” model, this should preferable be done by different people or different teams. Even though we fully agree with Andrews that it is the “to-be” model that is important, we still think that an “as-is” model is needed to better understand the current situation. It is also a useful model to compare with in order to measure the improvements once they have been implemented. Due to the 22

BPMI web site, http://www.bpmi.org Laguna M., Marklund J.P., Business Process Modeling, Simulation and Design, Prentice Hall, 2004 24 Harmon P., Business Process Change: A Manager’s Guide to Improving, Redesigning and Automating Processes, Morgan Kaufmann, 2002 25 Andrews D., The Pros and Cons of As-Is Modeling, Enterprise Reengineering, Reengineering Resource Center, 1996, http://www.reengineering.com 23

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limited scale of this thesis project, we did unfortunately not manage to follow Andrew’s otherwise very valid piece of advice that different people should draw up the different models. To facilitate the work of documentation, analysis and sometimes also simulations of the “as-is” and “to-be” models there are many business process-modeling tools available on the market. Among all available systems we decided to look at the tool Corporate Modeler from Casewise Ltd,, which is an extensive modeling package that comes with lots of procedures, recommendations and experience gained by others. 26 However, it soon became very clear that this tool was far too advanced and complex for our fairly simple modeling efforts. Instead we decided to use Microsoft Visio, which is also a very commonly used tool for business modeling, notably in small or medium-sized projects 27 .

3.4 Business Process Reengineering Theories about how to improve business processes is a very vast subject and for this thesis we have primarily looked into the concepts of Business Process Reengineering and some of its successors such as “X-Engineering”. Business Process Reengineering, or BPR for short, is a concept that refers to a situation where an organization fundamentally and radically redesigns its business processes in order to achieve dramatic improvements. 28 More practically, BPR can in a few words be explained as a method where no effort is being put on improving or streamlining the current processes and ways of working. Instead the idea is to start implementing new solutions completely from scratch without looking at how things were done in the past. This means that there is no streamlining inefficient ways of working, but the effort is put on the reengineering of a completely new process. A very simplistic example of a reengineered process is illustrated in figure 8.

Figure 8, Example of a reengineered process.

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Casewise web site, http://www.casewise.com Microsoft Visio web site (Sweden), http://office.microsoft.com/sv-se/FX010857981053.aspx 28 Hammer M., Champy J., “Reengineering the Corporation: A manifesto for Business Revolution”, 1993 27

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The term BPR was originally introduced in 1990 by Michael Hammer in his article “Reengineering the work: don’t automate – obliterate” in which he explains how information technology can be used in order to radically improve the competitiveness of an organization. 29 The empiric foundation for the BPR ideas was according to Hammer born during the late 70:s and early 80:s where a number of large American corporations such as Bell Atlantic, Ford, General Electric and General Motors were introducing extensive improvement programs and were undergoing radical changes. Worth mentioning is that the execution of these change programs were rather forced by the market conditions at that time and not founded on any established methods for radical improvements. The most well-known book on the subject, “Reengineering the Corporation: A manifesto for Business Revolution”, was written a few years later in 1993 by Michael Hammer and James Champy. 30 In this book it is important to notice that the authors now put less importance on the role of information technology and explain that even though IT might function as a catalyst in the reengineering process, it is not at all a mandatory component. Despite the initial success of the concepts around BPR, there were a significant number of companies failing to implement them in practice. Surveys conducted by organizations like PROSCI indicated for example failure rates between 50-80% for different types of reengineering projects. 31 This lead to the development of many additional and complementary theories, and both Hammer and Champy published new books on the subject. Hammer admits for example in his book “Beyond Rengineering” that he was wrong about the importance of making radical changes as proposed in his first BPR book 32 . In this second book he tries to repair this by saying that even though the radical aspect might be helpful it is not an essential element of the method. Champy also continued developing his ideas around BPR and recently published a book called “XEngineering the Corporation: Reinventing Your Business In the Digital Age” in which he in some respect goes back to Hammer’s original ideas of a more technology-driven change. 33 In his own words Champy describes X-Engineering as “as redesign of information technology-enabled processes across the company boundaries, between companies and other companies and companies and their customers.” One of the most important themes in this theory is to not only improve the internal processes but also the external ones. We believe that the new softer BPR methods and the thoughts behind the “cross-engineering” as expressed by Champy are both very interesting and quite close to our ideas of how e-business can bring benefits to an organization. For this project we found both lots of ideas and inspiration in the methods that he describes. Another potential problem when reengineering processes is the general risk of automating business processes with too rigid information technology solutions. For example, an IT solution for automating a set of internal processes might in spite of its efficiency turn out to be inflexible and thus very difficult to change. In other words, inflexible IT tools might lock the organization to a certain way of working or a certain way of doing business. 34 29

Lundberg, H. et al, Business Process Reengineering- ett integrerat synsätt. Magisteruppsats, Företagsekonomiska instutitionen, Lunds Universitet, 1998 30 Hammer M. et al, op cit 31 Prosci Reengineering Learning Center web site, www.prosci.com 32 Hammer M. Beyond reengineering, Harper Collins, New York, 1996 33 Champy J., X-Engineering the Corporation: Reinventing Your Business In the Digital Age, Warner Books, New York, 2002 34 D’Agostino D., Business Process Modeling: A Model Student, eWeek, , 2004, http://www.eweek.com

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Extensive implementations of IT-solutions also risk creating too strong dependencies on a specific software vendor, something that Shapiro also warns about and calls the “lock-in” mechanism. 35 This means that, in many cases it is not only the system itself that needs to be studied, but also the company behind it.

3.5 Technology-Driven Process Improvements An often-criticised disadvantage with the BPR methods is the radical approach that they preach. When introducing changes, it is naturally tempting to get inspired by the BPR ideas of simply forgetting about any legacy business models, information systems or available in-house knowledge and instead start all over from scratch. We believe that such methods work better in theory than in practice. At least in organizations that are functioning fairly well in the current situation. From our point of view, the first important step is therefore to carefully determine whether a dramatic change really is needed or wanted. Perhaps it would be fully satisfying to perform a series of minor changes or improvements of current processes in the current organization. Not only would such change efforts most likely be more manageable, they would certainly expose the change project and the organization too a much lower risk. There exists many such, less dramatic, change methods and some of the most well known ones are Continuous Process Improvement (CPI) and Total Quality Management (TQM). The overall goals of these change programs are very similar – to improve the current way of working, but the scope and incentives are often quite different. When looking more closely at the problem settings and scope when introducing or improving ebusiness solutions in an organization, we realized rather quickly that none of the above-mentioned methods would be perfectly suitable. For example CPI is a general approach based on monitoring and analysis of existing on-going processes and TQM is mainly focusing on the quality issues. What we were looking for was a roadmap for improving business processes by using e-business solutions as a tool to increase efficiency and productivity. In other terms, we were not interested in a simple automation of existing processes or just developing new business processes after the provided IT-functionality. The model we were searching for was a working method that, based on the existing business processes, would take the new technological possibilities into account and initiate technology-driven improvements that could develop and streamline the organization’s processes. Since we did not find any existing model guiding us in this work, we simply decided to develop our own based on existing models, our own experience but also including the specificity in the efforts of introducing information systems in an organization. This resulted in a step-by-step model that we call Technology-Driven Process Improvements, or TDPI for short. The TDPI model consists of three main phases, a documentation phase, an analysis phase and an implementation phase. In short they can be explained like this:

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Documentation phase. The TDPI effort always starts with a documentation phase where the current situation is depicted in an “as-is” model of the existing business processes and in a second “as-is” model of the used information systems.

−

Analysis phase. Following the documentation, the method proposes to perform an analysis of the current information systems architecture in order to see how it can be improved and, in turn, also open new possibilities for achieving process improvements. In other words, an analysis of how technology can drive business process improvements. The outcome of this

Shapiro C. et al, op cit

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phase is a “to-be” model of the information systems map that in turn helps developing the “tobe” business process model. −

Implementation phase. Once proposed how improvements can be done, it is of course important to make sure that they are correctly put into practice. Change is never an easy task and since the result of the TDPI analysis often includes both changes of current ways of working and new organizational structures, this is normally the most challenging phase of the three.

As figure 9 implies, our model is iterative. This is because we believe that improvement efforts in order to be efficient must be continuous. In other words, the second improvement effort should start autonomously after having completed the first round without waiting for the next emergency situation to arrive.

Figure 9, Technology-Driven Process Improvement – TDRI

In practice this means that as soon as the proposed changes are implemented, a new effort of inventory, interviewing and documentation starts. This will also show how well the previous improvement efforts have been applied and form the basis for the next round of analysis and implementations. Even though the TDPI model is our own creation, we can also see that others have expressed similar ideas. For example Fredholm writes that, when introducing E-business into an organization, the first step is to review the business processes and ask oneself how they may be altered supported by the possibilities offered by the new technology 36 . When the business processes are altered, the existing organization becomes out of date. Automating or altering a process is in many cases a highly complex task. The first obstacle is often to define what the process really is, and what the process in fact is supposed to do. In many companies 36

Fredholm, P., op.cit

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and organizations, this is far from obvious, and the personnel that initially knew what a certain process was supposed to do may not be working within the organization anymore. When eventually finding out the original purpose of each process, this may still not be a correct match with today’s situation. Business processes change over time, and the changes are not always documented properly. We believe that the TDPI model can be of great help in this work and in the next chapter the practical application of the model will be further explained.

3.6 The TDPI model explained In the TDPI model, as indicated in Figure 9, there are two main transaction blocks that imply specific analysis and preparation work. First of all there is the system analysis, which consists of drawing up a future information systems map based on the analysis done on the existing systems. Secondly, the process implementation transition block includes the tough work of implementing the new improved business processes that the new technology allows us to develop.

3.6.1 The system analysis The system analysis transition block in the TDPI model is where the technical analysis takes place. A technical analysis may be infinitely extensive and depends a lot on each studied case. Still we believe there exists a few essential key issues that always should be addressed in any system analysis – independently of size or specialization of the concerned organization. These issues may be divided into four different review steps and are presented in the Review Step Table below. Review step 1: Information storage • Standardized formats. If an organization can use a standardized storage format, different applications and interfaces can all use the same logic when reading and storing information. A limited number of data formats will also make both new developments and maintenance of existing systems less expensive. • Redundant information. Saving the same information several times not only costs money for additional storage, it also opens up for the possibility that the same piece of information differs depending on where it is stored. • Incoherent / inexact information. Incoherent information can render existing information useless or even cause damages if used. Information might also be inexact, which may lead to erroneous or indecisive decision-making. • Isolated islands of information. It does not matter how good information one possess, if it is not available to the appropriate systems or individuals. Information should not be isolated, but distributed throughout the organization. Review step 2: Information transactions • Manual transactions. These mean risk for human errors, and are relatively easy to avoid since they are within the organizations’ own premises. If there is any place where it is possible to automate manual procedures, it is within the organization itself. These also mean that transactions are likely to consume more time and resources than if they would be automated. • Automated transactions. As stated above, these lessen risk for human errors and generally save time and resources. • Missing / incomplete transactions. Are existing transactions as good as they could be? Are they missing pieces that could be beneficiary to the business? Are we missing transactions that should exist? Review step 3: Information processing • Colouring. When information is being processed, does this processing alter the information in any way? Will this information be used by other parties after it has been processed?

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• • •


Filtering. Will the information processing remove important information that is important to other parties? Diluting. Does the information processing add information that originates from other sources of information? Does this affect the quality of the original information? Efficiency. Are there alternative processing solutions that offer more efficient processing? Can the quality of the processing be improved?

Review step 4: System functionality • Possibilities of integrating or merging existing systems. A typical overlap in system functionality is derived from several existing systems performing similar procedures and logic. If these can be merged into one system, or at least less systems, time and money may be saved. • Possibilities of introducing new systems. New systems may either replace existing systems or automate manual procedures. Integrating systems may often require a disproportional amount of resources compared to the resources necessary to modify the systems themselves. Replacing several systems with a new one can therefore sometimes be a viable solution. New systems might also be introduced when a new type of need occurs that was not satisfied before.

3.6.2 The business process implementation We believe that it is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve major efficiency improvements using IT without altering the way the organisation functions in its every day work. In order to efficiently implement the proposed improvements, both procedural and organizational changes are often needed. Business process improvements might in a theoretical approach seem like a fairly straight-forward and almost clinical procedure. New business process maps are drawn, some people are assigned new duties and the costs are down to target levels. The reality is however slightly more complex since it involves people and their working habits. In general, change might often be perceived as threatening to the concerned people’s position, status, relationships, competence or security. 37 This means that a certain resistance to change is fully natural behaviour but its nature depends obviously a lot on how and to what extent the change project is presented within the organization. A common problem is also the potential misunderstanding or, worse, ignorance of the change implications for the individual commitment. It is for example important to remember that the organizational culture might have a very strong impact on how the message of change is interpreted on the different levels in the organization. In an organization, not used to altering circumstances or shifting working conditions, it might be very difficult to build up the understanding and sense of necessity for change. 38 The top two methods to overcome this kind of resistance are, according to Robbins, communication and participation. 39 . Communicating with employees in order to help them see the logic of the change can significantly reduce the resistance. In the same way it is difficult to resist a change decision in which one has participated. It is also useful to keep in mind that a wide involvement of the concerned personnel also can increase the quality of the change decisions. In our opinion, the recommendations of Robbins are very important but we believe that in a technology-driven change effort, like in the TDPI method, it is also essential to highlight the practical 37

Sims D., et al, Organizing and organizations – An introduction, Sage Publications, London, 1993 Kotter J.P, et al., Harvard Business Review on Change, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, 1991 39 Robbins Stephen P., Organization theory: Structure designs and applications, Prentice Hall, London 1990 38

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IT-related benefits for each involved group of people. As a basic rule, one should always try to provide some personal incentives for all people concerned by the change where there would be some obvious practical benefits in the daily work. A key issue during the implementation phase is to make sure that the implementation really is focussing on fulfilling process needs rather than “organizational needs”. In our experience, it is rather common that both process modelling and system implementations tend to take needs of certain groups or departments into account instead of looking at the processes on a global level. Such an approach, might lead to systems and procedures that are not functioning seamlessly across the different borders within the organisation. A result of this can often be that the functionality of several systems will become more or less overlapping and that transfer of information from one department to another might be difficult or done in a inefficient way. We would also like to stress that the work is not over once having carried out a successful implementation of a process improvement. The TDPI model is an iterative method, so a finished implementation should automatically be followed by a new analysis. The TDPI will then become an important tool in the efforts of working towards a continuous improvement within the organization. It is also important to remember that process improvement efforts are not something to focus on only during bad times. On the contrary, when business is good and resources plenty, it is of course easier to release sufficient amounts of resources and funding for this project. Such a way of working could also neutralize the potential negative labelling that process improvements might get if it is only being applied during crises or sensitive situations.

3.7 E-business in public sector Since CERN’s funding is politically controlled, political trends and visions are of importance. CERN must follow guidelines established y politicians, and if one wants to refine these guidelines one must gain approval for these refinements among these politicians. Therefore, it is interesting to look at the current situation regarding E-business within the public sector, and perhaps even more interesting to look at its trends. In year 2001, total public procurement spends represented 16.2% of the Europan Unions’ GDP around €1500 billion. The EU public procurement rules aim to ensure that this public money is spent in an appropriate manner. They are based on the principles of competitive tendering, transparency and non-discrimination, and facilitate the achievement of value for money for the taxpayer as well as promoting European trade. 40 Up to recently, the directives on public procurement have contained a number of articles that call for mandatory written form that could pose a barrier to e-procurement. The original directives date back to the 70’s and 80’s. When the European Commission presented its e-Europe 2005 Action Plan, it stated that by the end of 2005, Member States should carry out a significant part of public procurement electronically. The experience of the private sector shows that reducing costs is most efficiently achieved through the use of the Internet in supply chain management, including e-procurement 41 .

40

Official Journey of the European Union, Directive 2004/18/EC of the European parliament and of the council, http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/dat/2004/l_134/l_13420040430en01140240.pdf 41 eEurope 2005 web site, An information society for all, http://europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/news_library/eeurope2005/index _en.htm

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In the current directives, EU has included new provisions for taking into account of modern procurement methods and developments in best practice. Directive 2004/18/EC aims to simplify, clarify and modernise the existing EU rules for public procurement. The Directive brings together the three separate existing Directives 42 , for public works, supplies and services contracts into a single text. To take account of modern procurement techniques, there are new provisions facilitating the use of e-procurement, providing for competitive dialogue in the award of complex contracts, and explicitly providing for the use of framework agreements. In particular, all instances of mandatory written form have been removed and electronic communication allowed 43 . Theoretically, these openings should help open up public procurement for electronic procurement and tendering. That should also generate possibilities for CERN to amend its procurement procedures. As one might expect, these thoughts are not exclusive for the EU politicians. Similar developments are seen in other parts of the world, not the least in the Unites States of America. Today, government procurement offices not only within the European Union are opening up for electronic procurement. In many cases, they offices even demand that vendors participate in these eprocurement efforts, such as for tendering projects at the Office of Government Commerce in the United Kingdom 44 . Limited time duration contracts are awarded, and vendors who do not posses skills in e-procurement and guided through the process initially.

42

Directive 93/36/EEC concerning the award of supplies contracts, Directive 93/37/EEC concerning the award of works contracts, Directive 92/50/EEC concerning the award of services contracts, Directive 97/52/EC which amended the previous Directives 43 Europe 2005 web site, An Information Society For All, http://europa.eu.int/information_society/eeurope/news_library/eeurope2005.index_en.htm 44 Department of Health web site, UK, http://www.dh.gov.uk/ProcurementAndProposals/ProcurementPolicy/ETendering/fs/en?CONTENT_ID=400027 3&chk=/9v2a2

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4 E-business at CERN In the fourth chapter, the existing e-business infrastructure at CERN and its use will be presented. This will not only include a brief introduction to the different information systems deployed, but also a quick overview of the organizational structure and units supporting these tools. The focus is primarily set on systems linked to the two main processes that will be studied more in detail in chapter 5; purchasing processes and material management processes.

4.1 Strategies today and in the past CERN is, as already mentioned in the first chapter, an international non-profit organization with the main goal of achieving results within the domain of particle physics research. It is in other words not the typical kind of organization that people associates with the concepts of e-business and it could even be an organization not very interested in new electronic business methods at all. Quite on the contrary, CERN has in instead since almost 15 years been a cutting-edge user of information systems for automating internal business processes. In some respect CERN has even been driving the development of the fundamental infrastructure for modern e-business. It was notably at CERN that the computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 invented the World Wide Web. This consequently led to that the internal know-how and awareness of possibilities with new web technologies were far more advanced than most other companies and organizations during a long period of time. Despite both an early start and a fairly advanced usage of e-business concepts in certain areas within the organization, it is only during the last year or two that the term “e-business” made its entry in the vocabulary at CERN. This is a very interesting and rather common phenomenon at CERN, which partly can be explained by its organizational culture that has a built-in, non-outspoken but very much existing, scepticism to new business and management terminology. Being an organization that primarily deals with scientific and technical challenges, other domains of “softer sciences” have, at least in the past, gotten somehow less room and importance in people’s minds. This is probably why CERN do not have any written or well-defined official general policies about how to apply e-business concepts within its daily operations. Still it does apply it - and in some areas rather successfully as well.

4.2 Incentives and driving forces Due to the fact that CERN is a research organization, the incentives and driving forces for implementing different kind of e-business solutions in this case have been a little bit different compared to commercial companies. Since there has not been any profit to maximize, the motivation for these efforts has often originated from a general ambition to achieve improvements in efficiency, traceability or quality. A driving factor that must not be neglected is the general technical curiosity and interest in new software development technologies that often can be found at a research organization. Because, even though the fundamental research of CERN in principle is limited to particle physics and the technologies related to it, the spirit of research and development has also in some sense inspired all other parts of the organization. In the organizational culture of CERN it is therefore fair to say that there exists an internal strive for improvements. These efforts include obviously the automation of tasks and procedures with computerized tools as well. These attempts and the internal motivation have in many cases been even stronger than the economical incentives, which have led to projects for automating working procedures being launched, worked on

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and completed without any profound calculation of its economical impact. CERN’s cultural devotion to achieving better and more efficient technical solutions has in other words often proven to be stronger than its management.

4.3 Existing e-business tools at CERN At CERN, there are three main groups of information systems being used in order to support the administrative and technical operations in the organization. They are: administrative information systems, archiving systems and technical information systems.

Figure 10, Different types of information systems and their supporting unit at CERN.

These three groups of systems have many interaction points from both a logical and practical point of view in the daily operations. Yet they are not very well integrated or interfaced, and there are also three different organizational units at CERN that support them. This is why they will be presented separately in this chapter, which will include a quick overview of the most essential functionalities, from an e-business point of view.

4.4 Administrative information systems The Administrative Information System, AIS, unit at CERN was formed in 1990 and is since the beginning of 2004 a group of the IT Department. The IT-AIS group consists of around 30 people that are split up into six sections with different areas of responsibilities. This includes management decision support, human resource management, financial information management, logistics and materials management, project management, e-business and data sharing. One of the first important milestones in the history of the AIS group was the purchasing of the commercial ERP system Qualiac, formally known as Oriac and Siriac, in 1992. CERN was an early customer of this system and soon got into a fruitful collaboration with the vendor of the software. Qualiac, with its modules for finance and purchasing, has over the years been heavily customized and extended with external applications at CERN but it is still the core of the organization’s financial information management. Another cornerstone in the suite of applications provided by the AIS group is the ERP system BAAN. BAAN was bought by CERN in 1995 and even though the functionality of Qualiac and BAAN in some areas are very similar, the practical usage of the two is rather different. Whereas Qualiac takes care of financial and purchasing issues, BAAN is covering all material management issues such as stores management, export/import procedures and other matters related to logistics. A third major commercial system run and supported by the AIS group is Oracle HR, which is used as the basis for all information management related to the human resources. Even though this system is of highest importance for the operation of the organization, it will not be covered more in depth in this report.

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Around these commercial systems a network of in-house developed applications has been put in place, where almost all of them are web-based. The very first web application developed by the AIS group was a version of the Budget Holders Toolkit, also known as micro BHT. This tool was released as early as in 1996 and it was therefore probably one of the very first attempts of providing web-based financial applications in the world.

Figure 11, Structure of the IT-AIS Group. 45

4.4.1 EDH – Electronic Document Handling One of the most important in-house developed AIS applications is the Electronic Document Handling system, EDH, which despite its name rather should be classified as a workflow management system. In short terms it is a tool where the user can enter data in different web forms. That data, or documents, may then be circulated for an approval according to predefined procedures and organizational hierarchy. Once approved by an electronic signature, the data is then forwarded to the appropriate system or database. In other words, the purpose of EDH is to bring a document from A to B as quickly as possible. In practice this may mean getting from the first entry of a materials request to its approval and transfer into the correct information systems as soon as possible, or the entry and approval of a leave request. Some of the main advantages of this workflow system are that it avoids duplication of data entries, it reduces workflow delays and it validates corporate data. The approval privileges for the different users in EDH are based both on organizational and procedural roles and there exists also an advanced functionality for re-routing of signature in case of absences. EDH is today widely used all over CERN and plays a key role in most administrative activities within the organization. In total, there are around 10.000 users of the system including both people at CERN and at collaborating institutes. Per year, there are approximately 150.000 requests submitted through the system and they are on average signed off with some 360.000 electronic signatures. 46

45 46

Based on illustration by the IT-AIS group, 2004, http://ais.web.cern.ch/ais/manpower/aisnewstruct.html EDH Information Page, CERN IT-AIS, 2005, http://ais.web.cern.ch/ais/apps/edh/EDHStats.html

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Figure 12, The basic principles of EDH. 47

4.4.2 The CERN Stores Catalogue The CERN Stores Catalogue is being used for all internal and regular purchasing of standard components. This is an integrated part of the EDH system and is another example of a well working and fairly advanced application of e-business at CERN. The Stores application provides an online catalogue of more than 100.000 standardized items that can be ordered directly from the EDH web interface by filling in the materials request form. Parts of the on-line catalogue is managed and updated directly by the suppliers. This means that the person requesting a certain piece of equipment can browse both the stock of CERN and the stocks of some suppliers. The internal approval of the purchasing requisition is done with the standard EDH workflow functionality and for small orders with a value below 500 CHF, the order is automatically faxed to the supplier without any human intervention.

Figure 13, The material request form in EDH. 47

Based on sketch drawn by James Purvis during interview 30/06/2004

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CERN has also implemented EDI (Electronic Document Interface) in order to communicate with around ten different suppliers, but lack of standards and a very large total number of suppliers has made it difficult to see any return on investments for a more frequent use of this kind of technology. Right now the only successful EDI communication CERN has set up is with the British company Farnell that delivers electronics components to CERN. The current usage of the Stores Catalogue has nevertheless proven to be both very useful and efficient. A clear indication of this are the measured average time delays for submitted material requests. They show that 93% of all internal purchasing, covering everything from submitting the request up to the delivery, are completed within 24 hours. 71% of all internal purchasing procedures are electronically signed and approved within 30 minutes. 48

4.4.3 Contract Follow-Up The Contract Follow-Up application, or CFU for short, is a tool that is used in order to safeguard and keep trace of all official documentation and data related to the different the steps of the purchasing process. CFU is an AIS web application based on the in-house developed document management tool AISMedia. As the name CFU reveals, the original intentions were to provide a tool for the follow-up of contracts. In practice however, the tool has rather been used as an archiving system where the final versions of official documents have been stored. In chapter 5, the purchasing procedures and practical usage of CFU will be explained more in detail.

Figure 14, Typical screen from the CFU application. 49

4.4.4 The CERN Inventory All CERN equipment with a value above 1000 CHF and an expected lifetime exceeding one year must, according to the internal financial regulations of the organization, be included in a central inventory. 50 For this purpose the AIS Team has developed the CERN Inventory application, which today is used throughout the whole organization. In this system, it is among other things possible to keep track of the initial value of the equipment, its owner and its current location. The practical usage of this tool is however not the same in all departments and not all types of equipment are included in this database. Desktop computers and other office equipment are normally traced in the Inventory, whereas other technical infrastructure equipment or accelerator components instead are managed with the technical information systems. 48

EDH Information Page, CERN IT-AIS, 2005, http://ais.web.cern.ch/ais/apps/edh/EDHStats.html A guide to AISMedia, CERN IT-AIS, 2005, https://cfu.cern.ch 50 Internal Financial Regulations, CERN 1999, http://fi-dep.web.cern.ch/fi-dep/reglfin.htm 49

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In practice this dispersion of information into several different tools has led to that information in the inventory database is not always completely up-to-date. The effort of keeping the inventory updated has also in many cases been considered as an administrative over-head task with rather low priority. One reason for this could be that the practical use and purpose of the system do not seems to be very well known within the organization. A surprising fact is that there is no functionality for depreciation in the CERN Inventory application since this normally is one of the most important features in an inventory system.

4.4.5 Supplier DB Another key tool provided by AIS is the database of suppliers and their addresses, which internally often goes under the name Supplier DB. This is not a completely separate application, but the part of Qualiac that manages companies and their addresses. To this an in-house developed web-interface has been added. The Supplier DB contains names and addresses of some 30.000 companies that at some point in time have been in contact with CERN. The companies are also classified according to the domain in which they are active. It is the information stored in the Supplier DB that is the basis for all automated communication from Qualiac, but it also serves as a supporting tool for the purchasing officers when searching for potential suppliers. The workload of keeping such a database updated is significant and with the current 12 man-hours per week from the Finance Department plus occasional help from the Industrial Liaison Officers the database is still not considered as completely up to date. Some attempts have been done to update and synchronize this database with commercial databases of suppliers but these efforts have so far not been very successful.

4.4.6 Foundation – the platform for data sharing Data exchange is something very important for many of the AIS applications, both between each other but also with other information systems at CERN. To facilitate this, a common information gateway called Foundation has been created. In Foundation, all information that could be of interest for other applications is linked up via database tables and views. From this set of data, other applications can then easily be linked up in order to fetch needed information. A general and often repeated remark is that Foundation is a very useful tool for sharing information but it does not allow update of data. Many of the AIS applications have, however, various kinds of interfaces for active data exchange but they are less generic and less accessible than Foundation.

4.5 Archiving systems There exist several archiving systems for documents and publications at CERN but one of the most important ones is the CERN Document Server. This system is provided by the User Document Service unit, UDS, which is an another group within the IT Department. The main task of CDS is to provide the organization’s electronic web-based library, containing all major scientific documents and publications. The CDS services also include other specific applications such as the official photo and video databases and a large number of recorded lectures and seminars. The CDS databases contain today around 650.000 bibliographic records. 51

51

The CERN Document Server homepage, CERN, IT-UDS, 2004, http://cds.cern.ch/

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All CDS software has been developed in-house and many of them have been declared as open source applications, making it possible for others to use them free of charge. The most interesting CDS application from an e-business perspective is perhaps the e-tendering system. This system provides access to electronic formats of all tendering documentation for external companies involved in the purchasing procedures of the organization. The introduction of this tool has made it possible to avoid sending paper copies of all the tending documentation to a large number of involved parties. A more detailed and practical description of this system will be presented in chapter 5.

‘ Figure 15, The web-based CERN e-tendering system.

4.6 Technical information systems A third group of systems at CERN is the technical information systems, which internally at CERN often go under the label CERN Engineering Data Management System, or EDMS for short. The EDMS is a suite of tools that are focusing on capturing and managing information coming from the technical departments and the different engineering projects run at CERN.

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Figure 16, Architecture of the CERN Engineering Data Management System. 52

The work of developing and supporting these tools is done by the EDMS team, which in total consists of around 15 people. Organizational wise, the EDMS Team consists of two sections from the Control, Safety and Engineering Databases group in the Technical Support Department, TS-CSE. The EDMS is a compound system consisting of two commercial data management products, which have been integrated into one single platform at CERN. The first of the two is Axalant, which is a Product Lifecycle Management system from the American company Agile and is used to handle and organize all technical information being generated at CERN. This includes notably project breakdown structures, design configurations, documents and drawings. This system was bought in 1997 by CERN from the, at that time, German company called Eigner and Partner. The second commercial tool, MP5 53 , is an Enterprise Asset Management system from the American vendor Datastream Systems, which allows CERN to track all its physical assets, the work being done on them and managing their maintenance. This tool, and its previous versions with other names, has been used at CERN for over 15 years. By combining and integrating these two systems, CERN has managed to create a common technical information infrastructure throughout the entire organization with a much wider scope than any of the two original individual applications. The CERN EDMS provide today a complete traceability of information in a project, starting from the planning and design phases, going through manufacturing and testing followed by the installation and maintenance phases. With this system, it is for example possible to scan a barcode of an individual piece of equipment and directly get its conceptual documentation and drawings together with its manufacturing, test and calibration information. A service technician can for example also easily get the full service history of all preventive and corrective maintenance tasks that have been carried out on this component. By developing a number of web applications on top of this common platform for technical information, the CERN EDMS has become word-wide available and the underlying complexity of the compound system has been hidden. The EDMS has today around 4600 users and is used both at CERN and collaborating external companies and institutes.

52

Widegren David, Introduction to the CERN EDMS – 1 day course, CERN EDMS Team, 2002, https://edms.cern.ch/document/101709 53 The last version of the MP5 application that was installed at CERN during March 2005 changed name to D7i. In this report we will nevertheless by coherency reasons continue referring to the tool as MP5.

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Figure 17, Overview of the CERN EDMS functionality throughout a project.

4.6.1 Document and design management One of the fundamental functions in the EDMS is the possibility to manage documents and drawings. Basically all technical documentation produced at CERN is being stored in the EDMS and it contains today some 500.000 drawings and documents. 54 The average ratio of growth during 2004 has been 9.000 documents per month. The document management part of the EDMS is a collaborative tool where documents can be worked on and shared by a group or a project and then be circulated for approval according to predefined procedures. Once a document is approved it is frozen and archived for all future.

Figure 18, Example of commenting process for documents in EDMS.

4.6.2 Production follow-up and supply chain management Another important part of the EDMS is the one linked to the management of physical assets related to the technical installations at CERN. The equipment management part of EDMS is mainly based on MP5 and the internally developed web application to facilitate this is called MTF, which originally was an abbreviation for Manufacturing and Test Folder. Since the start in 2001, the scope of the MTF has however gone far beyond just the management of equipment information for manufacturing and testing, but the abbreviation has still been kept. Today most accelerator components manufactured for the LHC are individually followed and managed with the MTF, which in March 2005 contained information about some 300.000 equipment. 54

As of March 2005.

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For all these equipment the different tasks related to manufacturing, test and installation are logged together with their current status and physical location. During the last 12 months, the system has been growing with information about approximately15.000 equipment per month. All major equipment suppliers and assembling companies involved in the LHC project are toady using the MTF. This way, it becomes a very powerful tool for production follow-up and supply chain management. Thanks to its capabilities of managing non-conformity reports, it is also an essential element for the quality management. Certain actions, such as reporting in MTF of successfully received and tested equipment, trigger email notifications sent to the different parties involved in the supply chain. It is based on these notifications that the payments for batches of components are done. In other words, components are not paid for until they are properly registered in the equipment management system.

Figure 19, An example of equipment workflow displayed in the MTF interface.

4.6.3 Asset tracking and maintenance management Many of the technical installations at CERN are located in zones that are classified as nuclear installations. This means that installed equipment must be carefully identified and tracked when for example being moved or replaced. For this MP5 is being used and is in addition to this storing other information about the equipment such as its state, the name of the responsible person and what subcomponents it might consist of. Being a powerful maintenance management system, MP5 can also automatically generate work orders for periodic preventive maintenance tasks, and may be used to log corrective service interventions. Today, approximately 350.000 pieces of equipment from the older accelerator complex and the technical infrastructure at CERN are already traced and maintained with MP5. The idea is use the same system for managing the LHC components once the new accelerator is installed. Since the MTF application is based on the kernel of MP5, all equipment registered with the MTF application are automatically also stored in MP5. No additional transfer of data is therefore needed.

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5 Technology-driven process improvements at CERN In this fifth chapter, the particular business processes related to purchasing and materials management at CERN will be mapped into flowcharts and analyzed more in detail. This will include an investigation of how to possibly improve the processes by applying the technology-driven process improvement model that was presented in the third chapter.

5.1 Introduction to purchasing at CERN The purchasing processes at CERN are fairly complex both due to the specialization of the organization and its official procedures. As an overall rule, the organization should apply the “lowest bidder principle” where the search for possible suppliers is carried out among its member states. In addition to this, the organization should also aim at placing the orders in the different member states in the same proportion as their financial membership contributions. Sweden is for example contributing with around 2.4% of CERN’s yearly budget, which means that the organization should aim at placing the same percentage of all industrial orders at Swedish companies. 55 To practically apply both these rules at the same time is obviously not an easy task. During our interviews at CERN we learned that the member states at several occasions have pointed out via the CERN council that a fair distribution of the industrial orders is more important than the principle of the lowest bidder. Even though these rules might seem to be a bit complicated, they do not directly cause any problems from an e-business perspective. However, the aim at achieving a fair distribution of orders between the member states has the side affect of generating a very large number of suppliers. Contracts are often signed for a limited period of maximum three years after which a new supplier will be searched for. This heavy rotation of suppliers makes it difficult to automate the business data exchange with anything else than standard solutions. Since standard solutions are rather rare, especially on a panEuropean basis covering a wide span of business specializations, electronic exchange of data with suppliers has at least so far not been easy to implement. The overall purchasing budget for materials at CERN has due to the phase of the LHC project over some peak years now been around 8-900 million CHF per year. These figures are expected to go down to around 60 millions in 2008. Today there is an average of around 30.000 orders generated per year throughout the organization.

5.2 The purchasing processes As briefly explained in chapter 4, standard items at CERN are ordered through the CERN Stores catalogue. Such an order follows a fairly streamlined and efficient procedure, which is a good example of a well-working implementation of e-business within the organization. Non-standard and more expensive orders are however managed in a much more complex way and will be studied more in detail in this section. In order to purchase an item or service outside CERN, the first step is to register an internal purchase request in EDH. At CERN such a request is normally called a “DAI”, which is an abbreviation for the French translation “Demand d’Achat Interne”. The following steps are then depending a little on the value of the order, where orders below 500 CHF automatically are faxed to the supplier once electronically approved in EDH.

55

CERN Annual Report, op. cit.

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For amounts over 500 CHF, the rules say that, one or several suppliers first must be asked for a written offer before any order can be approved. The number of suppliers to contact is again depending on the value of the order. If the order value estimated to less than 5000 CHF, it is only required to contact one supplier whereas at least three companies should be contacted if the value is above 5.000. 56 For all orders above 10.000 but below 200.000 CHF, a more formal procedure is required where a price enquiry should be carried out in which up to 10 companies should be contacted. Orders above 200.000 CHF follow an even more strict procedure in which both a market survey and a tendering process need to be carried out. To graphically describe the complete purchasing processes we have prepared a flowchart that is presented in Appendix E. This flowchart has been based on the written purchasing procedures from the Finance Department and the LHC Quality Assurance Plan. 57 58 As shown in Appendix E, the administrative procedure for orders above 200.000 CHF is fairly complex and many steps and sub-processes. An indication of the complexity is also the fact that it in practice takes around 32 weeks to complete the procedure for orders exceeding 750.000 CHF. In the following section we will study the particular procedure for orders between 200.000 and 750.000 CHF a bit more in detail and we will also try to show how the TDPI method can be used in order to improve its execution.

5.2.1 As-is business process When starting the work of mapping the written and non-written procedures into an “as-is” process flowchart, we realized quickly that this had never been done before. The task of including all tasks related to all involved information systems into a process map was therefore not a very easy task. Nevertheless, we will in the section try to describe the result of our mapping efforts. The process of treating orders between 200.000 and 750.000 CHF includes many steps for which several different information systems are being used. A simplified model of this procedure focusing on data management issues is illustrated in figure 20. Please note that this illustration is a subset of our more complete model shown in Appendix E. For all orders above 100.000 CHF, the first thing to do is to prepare a Divisional Request and to store this document in CFU via a web form in the EDH application. The Divisional Request is a document that informs the concerned management about planned future expenses, which is also the reason why the document is circulated for an approval by using the EDH workflow system. The actual internal purchase request, which normally is called a “DAI” after the French translation “Demande d’Achat Interne”, is after this entered directly in EDH. The purchase request is also circulated and approved in EDH. If the estimated value of the order is above 200.000 CHF, a Market Survey must be carried out. In short terms this means that a number of potential suppliers have to be contacted and informed about CERN’s need for a particular product or a service. The companies will receive a set of documents including a summary of the technical specification, the qualification criteria and a questionnaire. The idea is that the feedback from industry will indicate which companies would be interested in and capable of offering the desired product. 56

Purchasing Service Procedures, Finance Department, 2005, http://fi-purchasing.web.cern.ch/fi-purchasing/Proceduresbody.htm 57 Purchasing Service Procedures, op. cit. 58 LHC Quality Assurance Plan, LHC Project Management, 1999, http://lhc-proj-qawg.web.cern.ch/lhc-proj-qawg/LHCQAP/

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It is normally the technical group requiring the product that writes the different documents included in the Market Survey. That is also why these documents are first stored and approved in the system for technical documents, EDMS. Once approved in EDMS, these documents are manually copied one by one to the administrative document system, CFU, for an administrative circulation for approval. This manual operation of copying the documents from EDMS to CFU is normally done by the secretary in the group requesting the material.

Figure 20, As-is business process map for purchasing orders 200.00-750.000 CHF.

Once the Market Survey documents are stored and approved in CFU they are copied manually a second time to the CERN e-tendering system by staff in the Finance Department. It is from this system that the interested companies can retrieve more detailed information about the Market Survey. The contacted companies are normally selected based on suggestions from the internal requester at CERN, delegates, Industrial Liason Officers or from entries in the SupplierDB, which was briefly described in chapter 4. The communication with the selected firms is done both via normal mail and email that includes references to the CERN e-tendering system. In practice, this means that the external companies access a special web address in the e-tendering system from which they can retrieve all necessary documentation. For orders above 200.000 CHF, the Market Survey will be open for companies to reply during at least 6 weeks.

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The answers received from the potential suppliers are then studied and investigated further. Additional communication with the companies is done via mail, email and phone but this information is not stored in any of the existing systems. Up to 10 companies are then invited to participate in a tendering procedure. For this purpose, the “Invitation to Tender” documentation is prepared. In the same way, as for the Market Survey, the tendering document is first prepared by the technical group and stored and approved in the EDMS. After this it is manually copied to CFU in which it is administratively approved and then manually copied a second time to the e-tendering system. Once more, the replies from the potential suppliers are studied and compared. Finally, one single company is selected and the order is then manually created by the purchasing officer, who also manually sends it to the chosen supplier.

5.2.2 As-is information systems map When looking at the information systems involved in this process we see that there are several systems being used for the management of documents. Some documents like the Market Surveys, Invitation to Tender and Price Enquiries are in fact stored in the three document management systems that exist at CERN; EDMS, CFU and CDS. These three systems are not linked together and the documents are therefore copied by hand from one system to another. As mentioned in the previous section, the normal procedure is that technical staff prepare the document and store it in EDMS. After a technical approval in EDMS, a secretary copies the final approved version to CFU where a second administrative approval with EDH is done. Once approved in EDH, administrative staff from the finance department copies the document into the e-tendering system. The documents are in other words manually copied twice and stored in three systems.

Figure 21, As-is information systems map for purchasing documents.

5.2.3 To-be information systems map Some of the fundamental checks included in the system analysis step of the TDPI model are linked to identifying manual transactions, data duplication and potential data incoherencies in order to eliminate them. In this particular case there are three document management systems that contain the same documents that are transferred by hand and that possibly could lead to information incoherencies. A first question to investigate further is obviously if there really is a need for having three systems for document management at CERN. On top of this, they are provided by three different groups and even though all three systems have a slightly different focus, there are many similarities between them. On a long-term basis, it should probably be investigated how to merge these systems in order to reduce the amount of resources spent on developments and maintenance. Such a merge would also improve the quality of data by making sure that the same information is only stored once.

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A more short-term solution would however be to link the three systems together without necessarily merging them completely. This means that a document stored in one system could be accessed and searched for by the others. Such a solution would avoid any manual interventions of copying documents and would create a common Documentation Platform at CERN. An example of what this might look like is shown in figure 22.

Figure 22, To-be information systems map for purchasing documents.

If looking at the TDPI review step about information transactions, we see that one point in the checklist is trying to identify missing electronic transactions. In this particular case, it becomes obvious that it would be most useful if the replies from the potential suppliers for the market survey would be received and treated electronically. By standardizing the format for the replies it would not only be easier for the purchasing officer to browse amongst them, it would also be easier to trace back old documents. Concerning the tendering process where offers are received and opened during a formal tendering opening procedure, we believe that further investigations should be carried out in order to see how also this could be handled electronically. Until then, we believe that the tendering documents must be received on paper in sealed envelopes to guarantee that information stay fully secret until the tendering opening day.

5.2.4 To-be business process map If looking at the proposed changes in the information systems map, there are a number of new possibilities that open up when it comes to improving the purchasing process. In figure 23, we have then tried to put together all these proposed changes in our proposed to-be business process map. The effect of only having one single integrated document management platform, that we here call CERN Documentation Platform, eliminates first of all the need for storing the one and same document in several systems. This will not only be more efficient, it will also improve the quality of the information since a change of information in this case will be visible throughout the whole CERN environment. In our proposed to-be business process map, we have decided to keep the two different approval procedures for documents as it is today. The fact of having one technical and one administrative approval is in other words kept. What nevertheless could be investigated is if it would be possible to use the same workflow or approval management system for both circulations. We also believe that an automated order generation, similar to the one used for small orders, could also be used for larger orders. Even though fax or email communication would perhaps not be suitable for large orders, there are other means of automating the sending of paper mail that we think could be worth investigating further.

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Figure 23, To-be business process map for purchasing orders 200.00-750.000 CHF

5.3 Introduction to materials management at CERN The fact that CERN is building and operating huge particle accelerators means that the organization has to manage and maintain a large amount of technical equipment. The new LHC accelerator together with its particle detectors will for example consists of around 100 million components. All these technical components will be delivered to CERN, installed in the accelerator complex and must then be maintained for some 25 years. On top of the accelerator complex specific equipment, CERN has of course the same needs for office materials and other equipment that any other organization with a few thousands of people working on site. This means that the range of material that needs to be managed is extremely wide, covering everything from computers, mobile phones and office furniture to supra-conducting cables, lorries and radioactive sources. CERN is also classified as a nuclear installation and has agreed to follow corresponding French regulations for such sites. In French this category of installation is known as “Installation Nucléaire de Base”, or INB for short, and requires a strict traceability of all components entering and leaving such radioactive zones.

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5.4 The materials management processes Roughly speaking, there are two main groups of materials managed by CERN. First of all, there are the standard or off-the-shelf components that are either ordered via the CERN stores or directly from a supplier. This might be office material such as computers and faxes but also technical components such as control equipment or cables that will be installed in the accelerator complex. Depending on the practical use of the equipment, the corresponding processes and related information are slightly different. All components with a value exceeding 1000 CHF should normally be registered in the CERN Inventory, which is being used for administrative purposes. In practice it is often only the office equipment that gets registered in the inventory and not equipment aimed for a technical installation on the site. However, since technical equipment normally is being maintained and serviced, this type of equipment is instead registered and traced with the technical asset tracking and maintenance management system, MP5, which was briefly explained in chapter 4. The second main group of materials consists of components that are designed and manufactured especially for CERN. This includes, for example, the supra-conducting magnets, electronics or cryogenic equipment that are to be installed somewhere in the technical infrastructure at CERN. Many of these components are registered and already traced at the manufacturing sites by use of the MTF application. Typically, the manufacturers report the dates and results of certain manufacturing operations to CERN via this application. Once being installed at CERN, this type of equipment is normally being serviced and maintained, which means that they are all registered in MP5 for a proper logging of the component’s individual service and maintenance lifecycle.

5.4.1 As-is business processes As we try to illustrate in figure 24 and 25, it is in fact possible to divide the current materials management procedures into four individual processes when it comes to the information management issues. (An overview of the complete materials management process map that we draw can be found in Appendix E2.) The first visualized process concerns the manufacturing follow-up and reception tests, which covers non-standard equipment that is being manufactured both outside and inside CERN. In practice it means that each component gets registered in the MTF application and that the manufacturer is asked to report the date and result of a number of predefined workflow steps. For reported results that are not according to specification or not satisfactory, there is a special procedure for the handling of nonconformities in the system. 59 For many of the components manufactured for the LHC project, there is also an electronic approval from CERN in MTF before the concerned component can be delivered. Once the equipment has arrived at CERN there is also typically different kinds of technical reception tests that also are reported in MTF. In case of any problems during these tests, the same kind of nonconformity procedure as for the manufacturing steps is being applied. If the tests results are OK or if the opened non-conformity is being solved, then the equipment is normally ready to be used. In parallel, or rather just before the technical reception tests are reported in MTF, there is another process carried out related to the goods reception and internal transporting. Whereas the previously 59

Mottier M., Manola-Poggioli E., LHC QAP, Non-conformities reporting, CERN, 2002,

https://edms.cern.ch/document/351098/0

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described process had a technical focus and only concerned equipment especially manufactured for CERN, the goods reception and internal transporting process has a more administrative focus and is applicable to all equipment arriving at CERN. This includes consequently also standard and off-theshelf components. All goods arriving at CERN must, due to administrative and legal regulations, pass through the official goods reception. One reason for this is that CERN is an international organization and therefore is exonerated of VAT which means that certain administrative procedures have to be followed at reception time. 60

Figure 24, As-is business process map for materials management.

60

CERN Logistics Service, Guidelines Concerning Deliveries to CERN, http://servicelogistics.web.cern.ch/service-logistics/shipping/guidelines.htm

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At the goods reception the goods are also matched to the corresponding order number in Qualiac which make it possible to generate an internal transport request in order to deliver the goods to its requester. Depending on size, weight and other physical aspects, a suitable vehicle is being attributed and included in the automatically generated transport request. Once the delivery has been done, the confirmation by the transport personnel is transferred into Qualiac indicating that the component has reached its requestor. Normally an accelerator component is being transported several times internally at CERN before being installed and for each transport request the second half of the just described process is being repeated. Once a component has reached its final destination where it should be installed, there is a third subprocess that starts and includes the installation, maintenance and inspections. For the installation work and its related tests and inspections, the same system and procedures as for the manufacturing is being used. This means that all work carried out is reported in MTF and in case of non-conformities the same procedure is applied. If the concerned component has been followed-up during its fabrication, it is already registered in MTF, if not it has to be registered at the time of the preparation for installation. Installed equipment is often maintained according to certain well-defined preventive maintenance schedules where the oil in a pump, for example, should be changed every 6 months. In the same way, equipment may brake down and corrective maintenance interventions might be needed. Both these kinds of service interventions are reported in MP5, which is keeping track of each components’ individual technical lifecycle.

Figure 25, As-is business process map for materials management- continued.

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Equipment of certain types do also follow additional safety regulations and needs to be inspected by the Safety Commission at CERN with periodic intervals. These kinds of safety inspections are also logged in the MP5 tool. Last but not least there is the CERN Inventory process that corresponds to the management of the inventory of equipment at CERN. In the CERN inventory, one can for example find information about office equipment, where it is and who is responsible for it. The information about equipment registered in the inventory is kept up to date manually by administrative staff in each department.

5.4.2 As-is information systems map When looking at the different information systems being used for materials management, we find three more or less isolated groups of tools; the technical information management tools, the administrative information management tools and the inventory.

Figure 26, As-is information systems map for materials management.

Even if the purpose of each group of applications is slightly different, there are still many common denominators and there are also many physical components that are registered in all three groups. Even though the different applications are well integrated within their group of systems, there are no links between the technical and administrative system groups. It is also worth pointing out that two different organization units at CERN are supporting the different tools. The technical information systems are supported by the TS/CSE group whereas the administrative information applications are supported by the IT/AIS group.

5.4.3 To-be information systems map We believe that it would be most useful to investigate how to integrate the different systems that are being used to manage equipment at CERN. A first step could be to link the existing tools together into a common CERN Fixed Asset Inventory as indicated in figure 27.

Figure 27, To-be information systems map for materials management.

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A common Fixed Asset Inventory would mean that if registering a component that is being manufactured with MTF, then it would already be registered in the system when it arrives at the goods reception and can also directly be referred to from the inventory. This would also mean that when reporting the replacement of a faulty component and reporting this service intervention in MP5, then this new location of the equipment would automatically be updated in the Inventory. A second step and a more long-term solution would be to investigate if all three systems are needed or not. MP5, BAAN and Inventory have quite a lot of functionality in common with even bigger overlaps of data. A reduced number of tools would not only simplify the usage but also reduce both maintenance and licence costs as well.

5.4.4 To-be business process map If linking or integrating the different existing systems into a CERN Fixed Asset Inventory, FAI, there would be a number of immediate advantages from a data management point of view. However, the more important possibilities are related to the integration of the different processes presented in figure 24 and 25 into one continuous materials management process throughout the organization. We have tried to put together an example of what such an integrated process could look like in the to-be business process model illustrated in figure 28. In this integrated process we have two entry points; one for equipment specially manufactured for CERN and one for standard components. The main differences between this proposal and the old existing processes can be summarized like this; −

Goods reception process linked with the technical equipment follow-up process. By linking the goods reception procedure with the technical follow-up, equipment would only be registered once at CERN and the goods reception staff could also get information in advance about manufactured components that are about to arrive. In the same way, off-theshelf equipment would also automatically be registered in the technical systems, facilitating future installation follow-up, maintenance management and safety inspections. Ultimately, an integrated process like this would also force all equipment arriving at CERN to really pass through the central goods reception, avoiding potential problems with the customs authorities.

−

No specific process for updating the inventory. In the proposed solution, the inventory is fully integrated with the other systems, which means that instead of manually keeping it up-to-date it would now be fed with information from the other systems. For example, as soon as a component is delivered to its requester, information about its location and user would automatically be updated in the inventory. In the same way the inventory would get updated if a service technician performs an intervention by for example replacing components and putting some equipment back in stock. Such a solution would not only reduce the manpower needed in order to keep the inventory updated, it would also result in a higher accuracy and quality of the data.

−

New possibilities in finding information. This integration of technical and administrative information will also generate new interesting possibilities when it comes to finding important information. Today it is impossible for a technician working with the technical information systems to find non-technical information. If a component breaks down, it would be very useful to easily find information about its supplier, when it was bought, by whom and if it is still under warranty or not. This is not the case today, but would be possible with the proposed integrated system. In the same way, with the current systems, it is not possible for administrative staff to find the

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present location of a particular component by using the administrative tools. Today the administration basically looses trace of equipment once delivered to the requester internally at CERN. This would all be improved with the proposed system solution. Another practical advantage would be that each piece of equipment registered in the FAI would get a unique FAI identifier. This would be the key to retrieve both its technical and administrative documentation independently of where it is being stored.

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Figure 28, To-be materials management processes map for materials management.

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6 Conclusions and recommendations for future work In the sixth and last chapter the most important conclusions drawn in this project will be summarized. In addition to this some general recommendations for future work at CERN and a proposed action list will be presented.

6.1 General conclusions An important and first general conclusion to draw is that e-business solutions are possible to apply in an international research organization and CERN has shown to be a good example of how this can be done already. Still, we strongly believe that a more extensive and a better coordinated use of e-business within the organization could improve efficiency and reduce cost significantly by automating business processes that today are manual or missing. This would however require a strong commitment from the management declaring automation and streamlining of business processes as prioritised tasks. A second overall conclusion is that the TDPI method has proven to be most useful in the efforts of automating and improving business processes. We have also seen that the outcome of the model in terms of proposed improvements can include both technical and process related developments as well as organizational changes.

6.1.1 E-business for purchasing As shown in the previous chapter, there are many ways of immediately improving the current purchasing processes by simply drawing full advantage of the existing information systems. One important change would notably be the integration of the three different document management systems at CERN into a single documentation platform. Such a solution would obviously not only have a positive impact for the purchasing procedures, it would also lead to a more efficient use of resources on an organizational level as well. Such a system integration would however only be a starting point in a continued effort of promoting ebusiness for procurement at CERN. As we see it, this overall work of promoting e-business for purchasing should be considered as a path consisting of three steps. The first step would be to start negotiating for larger frame contracts with a lower number of suppliers than today. These contracts should also be allowed to have a longer duration than with the current rules. Fewer suppliers and longer contracts mean easier and more cost effective automation in the procurement process since the number of interfaces to CERN’s business systems will be reduced. This way, it would be much easier to move towards e-business facilitated solutions for all orders concerning items included in such frame contracts. For larger contracts where a strong involvement of both the purchasing and legal services at CERN are needed, we believe that the current way of working for practical reasons must be kept initially. As a second step, and with a more long-term focus, we are strongly convinced that it would be most beneficial for CERN to start investigating how the organization’s current purchasing rules could be simplified and made more suitable for procurement in the e-commerce era. Many of these regulations and guidelines date back from the 50’s and do not necessarily facilitate the efforts of streamlining and automating processes with modern information systems. One thing to start looking at could for example be what additional requirements concerning electronic data exchange facilities that should be compulsory for suppliers signing contracts with CERN. In this domain CERN could benefit from the work done within EU about how to facilitate e-commerce in the public sector. A comparison with organizations in the private sector would also be useful where

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companies, like Volvo Car Corporation, stated already in 2001 their vision to no longer accept paper invoices. Today around 75% of all invoicing is already done electronically. 61 The third step would be to completely incorporate the e-business philosophy in both the daily operations and in all developments of new business processes. It is important to remember that the introduction of new technology also affects the pace of communication. A supplier that confirms a delivery via email or via another electronic interface will most likely expect a quicker response from CERN compared to when sending a letter via traditional post. In other words, if not changing business speed in the same proportion as the communication speed changes, many of the advantages with the new technology will be lost.

6.1.2 E-business for materials management For the material management processes we have identified several isolated islands of information systems within the organization. These systems are all by themselves functional and very useful, but they do not communicate with each other - even if they sometimes contain the same information. This has led to that it is, for the moment, impossible to get an overview of the organization’s physical assets and the existing information stored in scattered databases is in many cases not up-to-date. In order to solve this we recommend, as a first step, to link the different systems into a common Fixed Asset Inventory. We believe that such an approach would be most useful for the whole organization since it would allow an integrated and more streamlined management of information concerning physical equipment. A second step would be to start investigating if the three existing systems all really are needed or if they can be merged or replaced by another tool. As a general remark, we believe that CERN should aim at avoiding having several systems with overlapping functionality, since this can be both costly and result in bad data quality. With an integrated system for managing fixed assets it is also important to remember that its success is completely depending on all involved parties playing the game by using it and by providing the correct information. The practical implementation must therefore be done in such a way that all major user groups get offered some incentives when start using the system. For example by making sure that people can find information that they could not easily get hold of before or by providing support for wireless handheld terminals that can be used to interact with the system from the field. We also suggest that all received equipment, directly at the goods reception, should be labelled with a barcode or RFID 62 tag carrying the unique FAI identifier. This would significantly facilitate the tracking of goods around the CERN sites and installations through the complete lifecycle of the equipment. The scanning of a barcode or reading of a RFID tag can speed up certain human interventions and do also reduce typing mistakes which also help making sure that the managed data is correct. There is today no depreciation of inventories. This means that the balance sheet does not reflect the true value of CERN’s assets. It also makes it difficult to apply standard methods for efficiency evaluation. When these assets finally are discarded, there is a sudden change in the accounting figures that do not look healthy. We suggest that CERN begins depreciating its assets in order to create a sounder financial environment.

61

Computer Sweden, Volvo har nått talet för e-fakturor, 2005-03-12, http://computersweden.idg.se/ArticlePages/200403/11/20040311172307_CS300/20040311172307_CS300.dbp.a sp 62 RFID is an abbreviation for Radio Frequency Identification and is the name of a technology and method for remotely storing and reading data devices called RFID tags or transponders.

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6.2 A new information management infrastructure In the previous chapter we have tried to show how a better use of information systems also can improve different processes in the organization. For each studied process, we have given some specific proposals of how to change the current information systems infrastructure. Although it is possible to implement these proposals all by themselves, we think that it might be wise to also consider them as building blocks in the drafting of a global CERN e-business strategy. Looking at CERN on an organization-wide level, we identified two main groups of fundamental problems with the current information management infrastructure. In a few words they can be summarized as this: −

Isolated islands of information systems. We have found several examples of systems that today are functioning completely independently of each other even though they are supporting linked processes and partly are containing the same information. An example of this is the case with the CERN Inventory, MP5 and BAAN that all are managing information related to physical equipment but that do not communicate with each other.

−

Overlapping functionality between systems. There are also many examples where different systems are being used to perform similar functions. One example of this is the three systems being used for document management at CERN; EDMS, CDS and AISMedia. Another example, is the fact that there are four advanced commercial business systems used within CERN that offer similar functionalities; MP5, BAAN, Qualiac and Axalant.

We believe that one explanation of how these problems have occurred is that both the systems and the use of them evolve over time. Many of the commercial systems at CERN have for example widened their capabilities by providing more functionality in each new version. As a result, systems that from the beginning had completely different scopes have today, functionality-wise, partly grown together without being integrated. At the same time, we are strongly convinced that an even more important factor for causing the current situation is the organizational structure concerning information management support. This will however be further discussed in section 6.3. In order to solve these problems from a technical point of view, we propose to draft a global strategy for achieving a new integrated information management infrastructure as illustrated in figure 29. Our proposal would be to create a common infrastructure built up on three information backbones where the existing administrative Foundation would be complemented by the Fixed Asset Inventory and Documentation Platform that we have presented in the previous chapter. Such a solution would, in our opinion, offer CERN a more flexible and generic way of integrating both commercial systems and in-house developed tools without the risk of falling in the same traps as before since all common information would be shared.

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Figure 29, Proposed architecture for an integrated information infrastructure at CERN.

6.3 A new organization for information management support CERN is a large organization comprising a huge number of technical and administrative disciplines that all have different needs of information systems support. However, despite the broad range of activities, we are convinced that a stronger coordination effort within this domain would be most beneficial for the organization. A striking fact is that there are three different groups at CERN that provide support for three different document management systems that partly contain the same documents. We doubt that this would be the case if there would have been a better coordination between the three groups or if they would have been more closely linked together in the organizational structure. We also believe that the number of commercial business systems being used would be much lower if there would not have been several groups providing the support for this kind of tools. In fact, as we see it, many of the architectural problems that have been pointed out are in fact caused by a lack of coordination or collaboration between the different groups providing support in this domain. This lack of coordination or collaboration can probably partly be explained by the fact that there is no organizational unit or management function responsible for these kinds of tasks today. We therefore strongly recommend that CERN immediately nominates a Chief Information Officer, CIO, with a clear mandate for coordinating all efforts concerning information systems within the entire organization. The CIO would maintain a complete overview of the information management needs making sure that no resources would be wasted by duplicating functions or systems. The mandate of this new management position would also include clearly pointing out the purpose of each system and to draw up the borderlines between them. In addition to this, we propose to more closely link together the currently separated information systems support resources. This can obviously be done in many different ways, where one possibility would be to keep the current organizational groups but in addition having them coordinated and supervised by the CIO.

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Another possibility would be to simply merge the current groups into a completely new organizational unit. In practice, this would mean linking the current AIS group, the EDMS team and the CDS team into an integrated organizational-wide service for information systems support. Independently of the selected organizational solution, we propose to gather the concerned activities into a number of services that all would be under the overall responsibility of the CIO. Examples of such services would be document and design data management, fixed asset management and administrative information management. All new development and implementation efforts would also be carried out on a project basis with people involved from each of the different concerned groups. Such a more matrix-oriented organization would hopefully avoid creating parallel tools and system functionality in the future. We also propose the creation of a separate unit purely working with the automation and improvement of processes on an organizational-wide basis. Today there exist a team in the Finance Department working with the streamlining of administrative procedures and another team in the Technical Support Department working with process streamlining and quality assurance on the technical side. 63 In our opinion, it would be more efficient to merge the two teams in order to work with process streamlining and quality assurance throughout the entire organization. This would for example avoid spending time and resources fine-tuning an information management process on the technical side that then would be followed by some completely manual work on the administration side – or the other way around. As we all know, sub-optimisation in a system is very rarely economically justified. An example of how a new possible organization for information systems support at CERN could look like is shown in Figure 30.

Figure 30, Example of a new possible organization for information systems support at CERN.

6.4 Recommended areas for future work In additional to the already proposed changes and improvements, we would also like to point out a number of areas in which we believe that some additional work could have a very positive effect for the organization on a more long-term basis. Briefly they can be summarized like this: −

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Review of existing purchasing rules and procedures. We believe that it would be most beneficial to start investigating how the current purchasing procedures could be modernized and become more adapted to the e-business era. This would typically include a review of the way of exchanging information with suppliers but also a

In the CERN organization this corresponds to FI-OP-CS and TS-CSE-QMS.

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critical study of the internal processes. The current rules should also be updated taking the technological evolution into account where for example a response time of 6-10 weeks in the tendering procedures perhaps is not needed in the era of e-mails and online auctions. −

Common e-market places with other organizations. It could also be most interesting to investigate the possibilities of forming or joining e-market places with other research organizations or international organizations that might have similar purchasing needs or constraints.

−

Commercial catalogues for replacing Supplier DB. The current database of suppliers that is being maintained by CERN could perhaps be replaced by one or several commercial electronic catalogue services. This would mean that the work of keeping addresses, phone numbers and company names up-to-date would be carried out by a company specialized in this domain. Such a solution could possibly not only be less expensive for CERN, it could also lead to a more updated and correct database.

−

Benchmarking against other international organizations. Another interesting possibility would be to do some benchmarking with other international organizations in order to compare the efficiency when it comes to the use of e-business solutions. CERN is not alone in its efforts of automating processes by using information systems and there are most likely other organizations that have the same kind of problems and that would be interested in collaborating in this domain.

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References Printed material: Champy James, X-Engineering: Reinventing Your Business In the Digital Age, Warner Books, 2003 Davenport T.H.& Short J.E., The New Industrial Engineering: Information Technology and Business Process Redesign, Sloan Management Review p.11-27, 1990 Eriksson L.T., Widersheim-Paul F, Att utreda, forska och rapportera,Liber Ekonomi 1997 Eriksson L.T., Hultman P., De nya Affärsmodellerna, Zink Media, Stockholm, Sweden, 2001 Fredholm, Peter, Elektroniska Affärer, Studentlitteratur, Lund, Sweden, 2000 Hammer M., Champy J., Reengineering the Corporation: A manifesto for Business Revolution, Harper-Collins, New York, 1993 Hammer M. Beyond reengineering, Harper Collins, New York, 1996 Hammer M., The Agenda – What Every Business Must Do to Dominate the Decade, Three rivers press, New York, 2001 Harmon Paul, Business Process Change: A Manager’s Guide to Improving, Redesigning and Automating Processes, Morgan Kaufmann, 2002 IBM, E-business on demand solutions, Executive Brief, Adapt and Thrive – the journey to e-business on demand, April 2003 Kim Hua T., Oui Kean Gee R., Quality Management in CERN’s Purchasing Service, Master Thesis, Division of Quality Technology, Linköping’s Institute of Technology, 1999 Laguna M., Marklund J. P., Business Process Modeling, Simulation and Design, Prentice Hall, 2004 Lundberg, H., Sergén V., Östholm S., Business Process Reengineering- ett integrerat synsätt. Magisteruppsats, Företagsekonomiska instutitionen, Lunds Universitet, 1998 Sims David, Fineman Stephan, Gabriel Yiannis, Organizing & Organizations – An Introduction, SAGE Publications, London, 1993 Shapiro, Varian, Information Rules, Harvard Business School Press, Boston, MA, USA, 1999 Robbins Stephen P., Organization Theory: Structure Designs and Applications, Prentice-Hall, London, 1990 Turban, Lee, King, Chung, Electronic Commerce – a managerial perspective, page 4, Prentice Hall International, New Jersey, USA, 2000 Yin R. K., Case study research - design and methods, Sage Publications, 1994

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CERN Material Administrative Procedures Manual - Invitations to Tender, Finance Department, 2000, http://ais.web.cern.ch/ais/projs/cfu/procedures/ao-do.pdf Administrative Procedures Manual - Market Surveys, Finance Department, 2000, http://ais.web.cern.ch/ais/projs/cfu/procedures/ms.pdf ATLAS Experiment, ATLAS Outreach unit, 2003, http://atlas.web.cern.ch/Atlas/documentation/EDUC/atlas.html CERN Annual Report 2003, http://www.cern.ch/User/AnnualReport2003.pdf CERN Document Server homepage, IT-UDS, 2004, http://cds.cern.ch/ Guidelines Concerning Deliveries to CERN, Logistics Service, 2004, http://servicelogistics.web.cern.ch/service-logistics/shipping/guidelines.htm Guidelines for users of the CERN Purchasing Service, Finanace Department, 2005, http://fi-purchasing.web.cern.ch/fi-purchasing/guidelines/guidelines.asp Internal Financial Regulations, CERN, 1999, http://fi-dep.web.cern.ch/fi-dep/reglfin.htm Introduction to the CERN EDMS – 1 day course, CERN EDMS Team, 2002, https://edms.cern.ch/document/101709 LHC Project Home Page, LHC Project Management, 2004, http://www.cern.ch/lhc Non-conformities reporting, LHC QAP, 2002, https://edms.cern.ch/document/351098/0 Purchasing Service Procedures, Finance Department, 2005, http://fi-purchasing.web.cern.ch/fipurchasing/Proceduresbody.htm

Internet sources: Andrews D., The Pros and Cons of As-Is Modeling, Enterprise Reengineering, Reengineering Resource Center, 1996, http://www.reengineering.com BPMI web site, Business Process Management Initiative, http://www.bpmi.org Casewise web site, http://www.casewise.com Computer Sweden, Volvo har nått talet för e-fakturor, 2005-03-12, http://computersweden.idg.se/ArticlePages/200403/11/20040311172307_CS300/20040311172307_CS 300.dbp.asp D’Agostino D., Business Process Modeling: A Model Student, eWeek, , 2004, http://www.eweek.com Department of Health UK web site, http://www.dh.gov.uk Evolucy, E-business at Evolucy: Basic concepts and services, 2005 www.evolucy.com/eng/ebusiness.html European Union, European Union Online, http://europa.eu.int

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Fenton, Paul, Literature reviews and thesis structure, Massey University, 2004 http://auckland.massey.ac.nz/dept/ss/documents/literature_reviews_workshop_2_notes.pdf, IBM web site, www.ibm.com IDG web site, www.idg.se List Dennis, Quantitative or Qualitative Research, Audience Dialogue, 2004, http://www.audiencedialogue.org/qualiquant.html, 2004-06-13 Microsoft Visio web site (Sweden), http://office.microsoft.com/sv-se/FX010857981053.aspx Popkin web site , www.popkin.com Prosci Reengineering Learning Center web site, www.prosci.com Suler John, Using Interviews in Research, Ryder University, 2004, http://www.rider.edu/~suler/interviews.html, 2004-06-14 All internet references were checked and accessible in March 2005.

Interviews at CERN James Purvis, Section Leader IT-AIS-FLP (Finance, Logistics & Purchasing Section of the Administrative Information Services Group in the IT Department), 28 June 2004 Matti Tiirakari, Group Leader FI-LS (Logistics Service Group in the Finance Department), 29 June 2004 Jean-Marc Saint-Viteux, Section Leader FI-DI-OP (Organization & Procedures Section of the DI Group in the Finance Department), 30 June 2004 Flavio Costa, Section Leader FI-CTR-RC (Reporting & Computer Support Section of the CTR Group in Finance Department), 30 June 2004 Anders Unnervik, Deputy Group Leader FI-PI (Purchasing and Industrial Services Group in the Finance Department), 30 June 2004 Christophe Delamare, Deputy Group Leader TS-CSE (Controls, Safety and Engineering Databases Group of the Technical Support Department), 28 June 2004 Michael Karlsson, IT-AIS-MDS (Management Decision Support Section of the Administrative Information Services Group in the IT Department), 28 June 2004

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Appendix A About the students Niklas Olsson has a M.Sc. degree in mechanical engineering with a major in mechatronics from KTH, Stockholm. In parallel to his engineering studies he also followed courses at Stockholm School of Business, Stockholm University, corresponding to more than 1,5 years of full-time studies. After his engineering studies he worked two years at the NeuroMuscular Research Center at Boston University as a research engineer. Back in Sweden he has had positions as a developer and system architect in both the banking and telecom sectors. Niklas is today working at SEB Merchant Banking in Stockholm as an integration expert for currency-trading systems. David Widegren has a M.Sc degree in mechanical engineering with a major in computer systems for design and manufacturing from KTH, Stockholm. In parallel to this, he was also studying economics and business administration at Stockholm School of Business together with Niklas. Both during and after his studies, David worked with his own consulting firm as a specialist teaching best practice and methodology for computer aided design and product data management at manufacturing companies in Sweden. Since 1999 he is employed at CERN, Geneva, where he today is working as an internal consultant with engineering and equipment data management issues.

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Appendix B Quick guide to the TQM notation standard

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Appendix C Supporting questions for the interviews For each interview that we will do at CERN will prepare a business processes map in advance, as far as we have understood it. This map will then be the basis for our discussion during which we will verify the map and asking questions of how could be improved. To facilitate this discussion we have created a sort of check list with a set of questions to cover during the interview. These questions will not be strictly followed concerning order or even contents, but rather serve as a help not forgetting any important topics during the meeting. Our interviewees all represent providers of e-business, but they are also e-business users from other systems’ perspective. Therefore we have not categorized our questions into provider and user categories.

Questions to e-business providers and users of the systems Business map related questions: 1. What does your system do? 2. Is it an in-house or a commercially available system? 3. If a commercial system, how customized is it? 4. How is maintaining the system? 5. Are there any interfaces to other services/departments? 6. What information is being passed to the people at the end of this process chain? 7. Do you know how they are using this information? 8. What information is being passed on to you? 9. What information do you need in order to perform your activities? 10. Is there information you possess that might be useful to other systems? 11. Are these processes working well and efficient according to you? 12. If being in a position to change the processes, what would you do? 13. What would you want to change if no barrels were hold? 14. Are there any obstacles in way of your work? About information systems used: 15. What IT tools and/or systems are you using? 16. Are you satisfied with the functionality of the IT tools? 17. Are you satisfies with the ease-of-use of the IT tools? 18. How is information captured with the tools? 19. What useful information is not captured with the tools? 20. Could these tools become more efficient according to you? How? 21. Is this information available to people outside this process chain? 22. Can you see any manual procedures that could be automated? 23. Do you have access to all information you need? 24. Are there other systems at CERN you would like to have access to? 25. Are there other systems that should have access to your input? 26. What would you want to change if no barrels were hold? 27. Are there any obstacles in way of your work?

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Appendix D Reflection of interview methodology For the interview part of this work, both authors where on site at CERN and the interviews where carried out of them together. As stated in the methodology section of this report, our intention was to keep our interviewing techniques to a down to earth level. Our focus was to be more on what the interviewee said than how the interviewee expressed himself/herself. We believe this approach worked well, our interviewees where outspoken and in many cases expressed similar opinions and views upon their work at CERN. However, during our interviews we noticed that some questions were treated more carefully by some interviewees. Instead of moving on away from these questions we then tried to alter our approach in order to extract the answers to the questions. While doing this it was important that our words did not colour our answers. We found that a good way of achieving this was simply to ask neutral questions, but more detailed ones, until the interviewee found it natural to express his/hers personal reflections. While interviewing, there is a risk that some interviewees get carried away and never stops talking about various issues. Our experience is that our interviewees were aware of the time aspect, and did not spend too much time on less important issues. We could tell they tried to make the most of our time with them. During those interviews that were less time constrained, the discussion could be more elaborated regarding certain questions. We believe that the fact that one of us is an employee at CERN, and one is an ”outsider”, was affecting the quality of the interviews in a very positive way. While we had no problems setting up our meetings for the interviews, and getting the interviewees to trust us, the discussions were kept at a neutral level that in some aspects would be hard to achieve if only CERN staff would have been present. Notes during the interviews were taken manually and directly transferred into two laptop computers directly following the interviews. Our notes were then discussed between us and typed together in a more organized way. There is a risk that some information are missed when typing notes, but the fact that there were two of us, and that recording equipment may put a mental restrain on the interviewees make us believe that our choice to take notes manually was correct. After all, this research is not carried out on a detail level, but rather an overall one.

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Appendix E E.1 CERN purchasing procedure (as-is)

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E.11 CERN purchasing procedure (as-is) – continued

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E.2 CERN materials management procedures (as-is)

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