Case Study: Dow Corning Corporation

Implementing SAP and Supply Chain Management

Dow Corning Corporation is a leading producer of silicone materials and polycrystalline silicon. The company has annual revenues of approximately $2.5 billion, with greater than 50% of it's sales base being outside the United States. They are nearing completion of the installation of SAP's integrated software suites (an ERP system) worldwide. This installation process has identified a number of business process improvements. Dow Corning is taking advantage of these opportunities by rationalizing and standardizing many of their global business processes. They feel it is particularly important that these process changes be documented to provide a basis for continued process innovation from future learning.

Before working with Phios, Dow Corning had developed models of the business processes they expected to use with SAP. These models are quite detailed, including color coding to indicate which activities in the process are performed using SAP functions, which are performed manually, and which are performed with legacy software systems.

Like most companies, Dow Corning used the Visio business diagramming tool to represent these models As such, the models were essentially isolated drawings: Whenever an arrow from one diagram pointed to another diagram, or whenever the same activity was used in multiple diagrams, consistency between the different diagrams had to be maintained manually.

In their discussions with Phios, Dow Corning realized that what they really wanted was an underlying process repository that would maintain a single, consistent representation of all their business processes and would allow different subsets of the processes to be viewed in different ways at different times.

Working with Dow Corning, Phios developed software to automatically import the existing Dow Corning Visio diagrams into the Phios Process Repository. Phios also developed software to edit the contents of the repository using Visio as a "live" user interface. This Visio-based user interface became the primary user interface in the Phios Process Editor, and is the basis of the current Web Editor.

Dow Corning now has more than fifty SAP-related business processes represented in the Phios Process Repository, each including a number of activities and events. They are preparing to use the Phios Process Repository to make these process models and related documentation available on their corporate Intranet to the people who manage and carry out these processes.

After initially representing their SAP-related processes in the Phios Process Repository, Dow Corning also became interested in using the Phios repository to analyze their processes from an integrated supply chain perspective. The supply chain model they wanted to use was the Supply Chain Operations Reference (SCOR) model developed by the Supply Chain Council, already included in the Phios Process Repository. In doing this supply chain modeling, however, Dow Corning wanted to take as much advantage as possible of the work they had already done on representing SAP processes.

Using the Phios tools, Dow Corning easily created a new, specialized version of the SCOR model that was specific to them. They then modified this specialized model to include links to the detailed SAP-related processes used to perform their various supply chain activities. In this way, Dow Corning was able to re-use the same detailed models in multiple ways for different purposes.

In addition to their SAP and supply chain modeling, Dow Corning is also investigating using the Phios Process Repository for other purposes such as ISO 9000 modeling and compliance with regulated processes such as those for handling hazardous materials.