Business Engineering

There has been another notion and approach put forth since 2005 by the Institute of Business Engineers (IBE) while sharing the common vision and advocacy of multi-disciplinary and holistic business view, and targeting the addressed issues in business practice and education.

The IBE put forth some principles and framework addressing the modeling of the business in a holistic, concise and structural manner. The model abstracts distinct, clearly defined key elements, processes, functions and relations from the complex, vague and loosely coupled business concepts. With the emphasis of holistic and integrative system view, it helps structurally and concisely capture a specific circumstance of business in four tiers, which are in turn composed of smaller constituents, for strategic planning and implementation:

• Finance: an internal tier that concisely reflects the enterprise's financial status and performance, indicating the well-being of the enterprise by the financial data presented in balance sheet and income statement.
• Business functions: an internal tier that reflects an enterprise's composition of the core business functions that collaboratively undertake all internal processes to achieve business goals with the constraints of their allocated cost.
• Market environment: an external tier that reflects the environment that affect the micro marketing circumstance that the business is facing.
• Industry environment: an external tier that reflects the environment that affect the macro marketing or industrial circumstance that the business is facing.

Furthermore, to a certain extent, this model is claimed to provide a generic framework for filling the gap of other business engineering approaches in specifying business circumstances, serving as one of key pieces of puzzle in the full picture of business engineering.