Let us share our views regarding ERP enabled Business Process Reengineering (BPR)?

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes of an organization to achieve dramatic improvement in critical contemporary measures of performance such as cost, quality, service and speed. In simple terms, the process of examining current processes and redesigning those processes to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of an organization is called BPR.

More precisely, BPR means the rapid and radical redesign of strategic, value-added business processes and system, policies and organizational structure that support them to optimize workflow and productivity in an organization.

BPR concurrently pursued breakthrough improvements in quality, speed, service and cost by leveraging the potential of information technology while addressing the issues of organizational strategies and vision for change. Breakthrough improvement means quantum gains of5 to10 times compared to incremental improvements of20-30 per cent. These improvements are generally characterized in terms of improvement of product and service quality at low cost and less time lag between product designs to marketing.

Folks,

BPR concept is now transforming into BPM concepts. Because BPM itself is a complete world. In North America; we don't use word BPR but more about BPM. Another reason of this is to transfer more responsibilities towards Business instead of dependency on IT.

Thanks

Any radical re-design effort should not be founded on ERP; off the shelf ERP solutions provide cross organizational automation and many a times do not meet the business (process change) needs.  Work around through hard customization creates its on difficulties.  I suppose BPR or BPM efforts should focus on business needs and be ready to use other products in the market, which may bolt on to ERP as needed.

A truly successful BPR is significantly more involved than a simple ERP system with BPM features. It involves extensive knowledge of human behavior, market and systems evolution, in addition to specific field expertise. Methodical approaches such Six Sigma, Lean, or ITIL are only tools that help to identify how a task can be improved. Unfortunately this keeps workers stuck in the same box working more efficiently aided by faster processes. The end result is not more than a patch work of improvements, perhaps yielding30% improvement in productivity.

For the BPM to have the impact desired a whole new approach might be required. When Tesla built its Electric car, or When Apple put the iPod on the market, it was not the same old car getting built faster, or a new generation of music players (Cassett tape, or CD player) with a nicer look. These were built on visions to redefine the entire end object/objective. Once the vision is set the an organization starts tackling the optimal design of each individual process and element.

ERP enabled BPR through integrated modules covering all business processes and being able to exchange data with most of the degitized sensors which aided in degitizing a lot of required information.