SEMEURBAK

How To Achieve Success with ERP Software

ERP Business Processes Need Periodic Review. It is time to evaluate the way your Enterprise functions.

By: Kevin Son

www.TekoaERP.com

Todays Enterprise needs good business processes to succeed. One business process problem today’s enterprise has to cope with is that whether or not business processes need to be designed by anyone or by those who have special skills.

Creating an effective business process can help to generate more profits and to increase efficiency. What should be taken into consideration are the structure of your organization, the available budget for a business process design, and how people in your company would respond to changes.

A process design describes:

• The process flow – a series of tasks necessitated to attain a business goal
• The resources employed to implement the process
• The business environment in which the process runs

During business process design, also called business process redesign, organizations have to make an assessment about what is working and what is not working in their current business process. The superb business process design for companies is one that is effective when people in various departments can understand and implement it. Otherwise, all the costs and time employed in redesigning the process can be a waste, by possibly costing more than the previous process problems. Change management, making necessary changes during design, also is an important part of an effective process redesign.

There are numerous professional process design tools that are available, but a viewpoint exists that they are complicated. Nonetheless, drawing tools such as PowerPoint and Visio are often used to design processes, and countless processes come into being as a result.

However, without a central system that assesses the drawings, most companies are said not to:

• realistically understand how they run
• identify opportunities for automation
• control business and process expenses
• ascertain and handle risks with ease
• effectively deal with changes

Companies need to be in charge and make a professional managed design and development environment. A centralized system that stores all the processes would be a great progress, but the question still remains as to whether or not it should be created by professional designers or by anyone working in companies. The majority of people in the business claim that the second option will do.

However, few process designs created by anyone in an organization become part of its corporate asset, as most of them are not specific enough in describing the processes. If you know the importance of business processes, you would want to hire professional process people to design your business processes. However, that does not mean only the professionals should be involved. Successfully operating a company necessitates cooperation between a wide range of people with different skills and in various departments, meaning the process should be the same.

In other words, you do not want hundreds or more people to design their own for your business process, but you want everyone in your company to be involved in your business process design. Involving everyone by asking his or her opinions in the process both increases awareness and acceptance of the processes, and makes them better.

With the implementation of such a collaborative process design environment, organizations can ensure that the processes are for their people and involve the people, but just have them designed by professionals with professional tools.

For example, Michael Dell, the founder and CEO of Dell Incorporated, had an idea that a successful business process is to have the inventory as small as possible by directly connecting customers’ orders with the manufacturer. Dell said that the real difficulty is to get his people excited about what he is doing. Many businesses fall behind because they do not communicate an excitement that comes from being part of a winning team that can attain big goals. Dell added that a company would drift when it cannot motivate its people.

Kevin Son is a business student at Whitworth University.

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