A methodology for business processes identification: developing instruments for an effective enterprise system project

Abstract

Since the mid 1990s, thousands of companies around the world have implemented Enterprise Systems (ES), which are considered to be the most important development in the corporate use of information technology. By providing computerized support to business processes spanning both the enterprise and the supply chain, these systems have become an indispensable tool utilized by organizations to accomplish and maintain efficient and effective operational performance. However, there are many cases in which ES implementation has failed in terms of the required time and budget, and more importantly, in terms of functionality and performance. One of the main causes of these failures is the misidentification and improper selection of business processes to be implemented into the ES, which are a crucial element of the system's implementation life cycle. In order to achieve effective implementation, a ‘necessary and sufficient’ set of business processes must be designed and implemented. Implementing an excessive set of business processes is costly; yet implementing an insufficient set is ruinous. The heuristic identification of the set of business processes, based on requirement elicitation, is flawed; there is no guarantee that all the necessary processes have been captured (Type I error), and/or that superfluous processes have been selected for implementation (Type II error). The existing implementation methods do not include a methodology to address this vital issue. This thesis aims to resolve this problem and to provide a methodology that will generate a necessary and sufficient set of business processes in a given organization, based on its specific characteristics, which will be used as a baseline for implementing an ES. A proper definition of the business processes and their associated properties is proposed and detailed. The properties are then used as parameters to generate the complete set of all the possible business processes in the organization; from this set, necessary and sufficient processes are selected. The methodology exposes the fundamental level of business processes, which are then used as a baseline for further phases in the implementation process. The proposed methodology has been tested through the analysis of companies that have implemented ES. In each of these cases, the identification of business processes utilizing the proposed methodology has proven to provide superior results to those obtained through all other implemented practices, producing a better approximation of their existing business processes.