Maximizing Return on Investment Using ERP Applications

BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

Business process management practitioners generally recommend to senior leaders the following steps to deal with the business process design approach:

• Define the 6 to 10 cross-functional business processes that describe your organization.
• Assign business process owners who will have oversight responsibility for their process.
• Identify approaches to understanding existing processes, focusing on problems, issues, and opportunities for improvements, particularly looking at those places where errors occur or where handoffs between departments are problematic or inefficiencies exist (a process of selecting analysis and design tools).
• Design process flows between transactions or events that address these issues.

One of the problems encountered with the approach of many business process management practitioners today is that they have been stuck in the old pure “reengineering the corporation” approach advocated by Hammer and Champy two decades ago, without adding two additional steps that are necessary in this design (despite the fact that even Michael Hammer eventually adopted the combined approach as ERP platforms became more competent):2

• Understanding the business processes that are native to whatever enterprise platform has been selected.
• Selecting native approaches that meet the objectives of process designs, unless the business benefits support the adoption of non-native processes.

At times, evaluation of approaches to business design issues may ...