Implementation of the Process Approach and Business Process Management Concept in Croatian Shipyards

Today's standard Croatian shipyards are faced with major problems of the globalized shipbuilding market, whose main feature is an exceptional competition with great cost pressures. Therefore, this paper aims to explore a new model based on the implementation of the process approach and business process management concept in modern shipyards, as one of the possible answers to these market demands. The existing shipyards can be seen as very complex, huge and inflexible business-production systems. Regarding the organizational aspect, they are very “wide” and “deep” structured, which results in relatively weak effectiveness. Business processes represent a key role in forming the optimal organization of modern enterprises. In this paper we propose implementation of the process approach in the shipbuilding industry of Croatia, as the first step to achieve profitability, to define the forms of ownership and to achieve rationalization of operations, in order for shipbuilding to become the major foundation for the development of Croatian economy. The main result of this paper refers to business process management concept which enables Croatian shipyards to discover, document, automate, and continuously improve business processes to increase efficiency and reduce costs.