Business engineering

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Business Engineering is an interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on how complex businesses should be designed and managed.

Contents 1 Overview 2 History 3 Education 3.1 In Belgium 3.2 In Ontario 4 See also 5 References 6 Further reading 7 External links

Overview

Business engineering circumscribes the domain of designing new business fields. Unlike business development, business engineering does not only include marketing related tasks, but also most of the other business administration tasks. Financial and operational tasks are of equal importance, for example.

Business engineering includes all activities that are necessary to develop and maintain an independent line of business. It is comparable with starting a business, but includes the novel component. That means that there is no core market yet and market opportunities need to be created. Most likely, the output of business engineering substitutes known forms of supply, in existing markets.

Therefore business engineering aims to establish new, future oriented forms of businesses but with reference to existing or emerging needs. Business engineering is most likely related with the area of future technology. To abstract it, business engineering combines the establishment of a completely new business in a prospect business environment.

History

Business Engineering (BE) is defined by Van Meel and [[Sol (1996)^[1] as the "integral design of both organizational structures and information systems". Despite the numerous developments in this field, Business Engineering has so far achieved little theoretical and methodological support. In the 1990s Van Meel and Sol finished a four years action research project^[2] to overcome this problem. A key factor in their approach is dynamic modeling, a structured problem-solving approach for real-life problems using simulation.^[1]

Education

In Belgium

In Belgium, universities offer academic programmes in Business Engineering. These studies are combining management science, business administration, finance, economics, mathematics, sciences and technologies for the main but also computer science as well as social science (ethics and law) and foreign languages. They are composed of a Bachelor of Science (BS/BSc; 3-year track) and followed by a Master's degree leading to the title of "Business Engineer" ("Ingénieur de Gestion" in French / "Handelsingenieur" in Dutch). This master (MS/MSc; 2-year track) degree leads to a specialization (quantitative financial markets, IT & data management, industrial & environmental management, innovation management & entrepreneurship, marketing engineering, services management, operational research & econometrics, global strategy & leadership, etc.). Graduates are granted at the end of the five (or more) years a diploma of "Master of Science in Business Engineering".

Among others, university business schools offering those programmes are the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management (Université Libre de Bruxelles), the Louvain School of Management (Université catholique de Louvain / FUNDP - University of Namur / FUCaM - Catholic University College of Mons / FUSL - Saint-louis University of Brussels), HEC Management School - University of Liege, the KULeuven, Ghent University or still the University of Antwerp.

In Ontario

The University of Waterloo is hosting the Ontario Engineering Competition in late January of 2010 with the theme of "Redefining Engineering". The hope of this competition is to introduce the aspects of business in engineering and ecoinnovation to the competition. As the duties of engineer have expanded over the years to include doing more than just designing projects; the competition needs to expand as well. For more information see: www.oec2010.uwaterloo.ca[1]

See also

Related topics

• Business process modeling
• Enterprise engineering
• Enterprise modeling

People involved in Business engineering

• Sjir Nijssen
• Hubert Österle
• Henk G. Sol
• Jan Vanthienen

References

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Further reading

• Jack Elzinga, Thomas R. Gulledge, Chung-Yee Lee (1999). Business process engineering: advancing the state of the art. Springer, 1999. ISBN 0792384024
• Hubert Österle (1995). Business Engineering. Prozea- Und Systementwicklung: Band 1: Entwurfstechniken. Springer, 1995. ISBN 3540600485
• Nick V. Flor (2001). Web Business Engineering: Using Offline Activities to Drive Internet Strategies. Addison-Wesley, 2001. ISBN 020160468X
• Mike Robson, Philip Ullah (1996). A practical guide to business process re-engineering. Gower Publishing, Ltd., 1996. ISBN 0566075776
• David A. Taylor (1995). Business engineering with object technology. Wiley, 1995. ISBN 0471045217

External links

• IEEE Conference on E-Business Engineering

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