Optimising Business Performance with Standard Software Systems : How to Reorganise Workflows by Chance of Implementing New ERP-Systems (SAP®, BAANTM, Peoplesoft®, Navision® ...) or New Releases

Preface In recent years Standard Software has evolved from a tool for supporting commercial/administrative activities (e.g. financial ac­ counting) to integrated systems that cover entire business proc­ esses in companies. The rapid development of these systems, an increasing number of implementations, and the suppliers' an­ nouncements concerning the functional extension of their sys­ tems lead us to expect a further market penetration of Standard Software. SAP's Industrial Solutions, for instance, which are of­ fered for the key processes of entire lines of business demon­ strate the impressive success of Standard Software Systems. The widespread implementation of commercial Standard Soft­ ware has reqUired considerable investments by industrial and service companies. Now it is time to verify if the planned gains and advantages of these systems have actually been realised, i.e. one has to ask whether the systems payoff as originally ex­ pected. It has to be kept in mind that the vendors have promised far-reaching optimisation of their clients' business processes by means of the so called best-practice reference processes implied by their systems. The advantages of these best-practices should have been incorporated in the processes of the respective com­ panies. On closer inspection, one can see that the claimed advantages of the systems' capabilities in terms of optimised processes have not been realised in many of the current implementations. Studies and interviews undertaken with applying companies as part of the research for this book confirm this finding. This book is addressed at decision makers, project teams, project managers, company's IT-managers, and staff of consulting companies, who are either involved in complex standard software implementation, or release migration projects. The book stresses the shortcomings of many present standard software implementations which mainly pertain to insufficiently optimised business processes, thus standard software has caused a lot of dissatisfied companies. The authors analyse certain popular implementation approaches (life-cycle-models) of different Standard Software suppliers by the means of a specific evaluation framework to reveal life-cycle inherent weaknesses that cause the earlier mentioned problems. The book aims to eliminate these drawbacks by showing how a new semi-process oriented way of implementing modern standard software systems may contribute to a better business performance. An integrated life-cycle model which guides the project team in a goal-directed way for the software based redesign of business processes will be described on a detailed level. The vision of business process optimisation by means of integrated commercial standard software will be complemented by an introduction into the idea of business process orientation, important interdisciplinary aspects as well as modelling and optimisation techniques Front Matter....Pages I-XV Preliminary Overview....Pages 1-7 Standard Software: Hope and Disappointment....Pages 9-19 The Evolution of Business Process Orientation: From Fiction to Reality....Pages 21-43 Reveal The Opportunities: General Techniques for Business Process Optimisation....Pages 45-63 Unwanted But Necessary: Popular Approaches to Business Process Modelling....Pages 65-104 Beyond The Common View: Consideration of Interdisciplinary Aspects....Pages 105-128 Viewing The Status Quo: Review of Life-Cycle Approaches....Pages 129-177 A pragmatic Approach to a Semi-Process Driven Standard Software Implementation....Pages 179-413 Back Matter....Pages 414-427