By Bettijo B. Hirschi
A BYU business professor is helping in a global effort to make e-commerce more efficient.
Markus Gappmaier, professor of eBusiness process management, has worked for the past 10 years with process management.
A process is the steps taken to achieve a specific objective, said Valinda Rose, 35, a graduate student from Mapleton, studying information systems management.
Managing those processes is the way a business becomes more efficient, she said.
Gappmaier said process management is essential to eBusiness because customers of online companies expect fast and effective service.
Good process management is the best way to achieve those expectations, he said.
E-commerce also creates a greater need for management of business-to-business processes, Gappmaier said.
“There is no eBusiness – there is not dot-com – without business processes,” he said.
“Therefore managing those business processes is crucial to eBusiness.”
Gappmaier has been teaching his eBusiness process management methodologies at workshops throughout Europe, he said.
He recently returned from a class he taught in Berlin.
Gappmaier also taught classes in other parts of Germany and Austria.
At these seminars, Gappmaier has taught a number of people from various companies in 12 European countries, he said.
This year he plans to teach similar workshops in the United States, he said.
“This training is very important to stay at the edge of electronic business process management,” Gappmaier said.
In his classes at BYU, Gappmaier said students do research into eBusiness processes.
This research provides students with an in-depth understanding of how to change and improve processes, he said.
Rose said one of the big things she learned from Gappmaier’s class is: “If you want to be customer-oriented, you have to be process oriented.”
E-commerce is the wave of the future; therefore, it is important that businesses learn to streamline and make e-commerce more efficient, Rose said.
Rose said she learned a lot from Gappmaier, and she said he has a lot to offer students.
“I think he has a lot of value to bring to BYU students,” she said.
