What is Output Pooling

Business processes have arisen as the primary structuring object for enterprises (Davenport, 1993; Hammer & Champy, 1993; Scheer, 1999b). They overcome the recent function-orientation that leaded the organization of the enterprise since the industrial age in the 18th century (Wardell, Steiger, & Meiksins, 1999). However, current economic trends foster a specialization of the enterprise’s portfolio towards its core competencies (Prahalad & Hamel, 1990) and a simultaneous intensification of the inter-enterprise relations (Perry, 1999). Consequently, current value-generating structures consist of a set of highly specialized enterprises that intensively collaborate to create the intended products for the markets. Thus, the producing business process spans over multiple organizations. Therefore, the concept of business processes originally conceived for single-enterprise-purpose has to be extended to usage scenarios where multiple organizations jointly process outputs.