The process of rolling out an Enterprise Resource
Planning (ERP) system in an organization is one that is often fraught with
risk and resistance. Often ERP vendors fail to properly capture the existing
business processes that are at the core of the operation of the business,
rather they try to force fit whatever Best Practices that are encoded in the
ERP platform that is being used. The resulting system is often regarded as
very foreign to the concerned stakeholders. This often delays adoption, or
results in complete failure. In an often cited figure from META Group (cf.
http://tinyurl.com/yldfrj), failure rates of above 50% are not uncommon;
also in Egypt the rate tends to be higher than the international standard (cf.
Sondos Ashraf (2005), “Critical Success Factors of Enterprise Resource
Planning,” MSc. Thesis, Faculty of Computers and Information, Cairo
University, Egypt.).
We propose a consulting/training offering that aims at
ameliorating the risks involved in software implementation and transition from
weak organizational culture that emerged out of historical circumstances to a
strong one that is aligned to the organization's mission and values. Such
offering would promote the adoption of organizational learning and would
eventually give rise to a culture that is able to take initiatives and is
quick to react to stimuli and external forces in an optimal manner while
making best use of its resources.
The offering we propose is based on formally capturing
key business processes and collaboratively reengineering them to realize
higher efficiencies. Key stakeholders are involved in the reengineering
process so as no solution or process design comes about
ex nihilo.
This maximizes
buying in and readiness for a successful software implementation. The approach
differs categorically form traditional reengineering methodologies that try to
aggressively impose perceived beneficial changes while not taking people into
account. By adopting a participatory approach to BPR we make for much smother
and easier transition to implementation of enhanced processes.
Our offering
involves the following five steps:
-
Capturing
existing business processes
-
Establishing
reengineering work groups and schedule working sessions
-
Synthesizing
the inputs from the working sessions to build an organization wide
reengineering plan
-
Implementing
new re engineered processes and putting systems in places that allow for
process monitoring
-
Building a
software requirements specification document that take into account all the
operational constraints within the organization
