Business Process and SAP ERP

1. Definition of Organisation

- Organizations are created entities within and through which people interact to reach individual and collective goals.

- Organisations are established to achieve some objectives.

-There are a set of business processes involved in each organisation.

2. Business Process

- Business process is a coordinated set of activities and that involve the use of resources to produce valuable products or services.

- Processes are the means through which organizations deliver values to internal and external customers.

- Processes (standards operating procedures) generally reflect years of learning about how to do things efficiently in a given industry or organization.

3. Importance of Business Process Improvement

-Specialization

- specialization of labour

- enabled organizations to produce more products through higher efficiency

- Total Quality Management (TQM)

- focus on reduction of variability and defects on process outputs

- continuous incremental improvement

- Business Process Reengineering (BPR)

- radical and innovative process change

- IT is a critical enabler

4. The Silo Effect

- Each functional areas work in isolation

- Lack of understanding of the big picture

- Inefficient interaction across functions

- Difficult to coordinate activities across functional areas

5. The solution

- Enterprise Systems

- Integrates applications across functional areas

- Enable efficient and effective information sharing across functional areas

- ERP focus on intra-organisational processes

6. Definition of ERP

An Enterprise Resource Planning system is a packaged business software system that allow a company to

- automate and integrate the majority of its business processes

- share common data and practices across the entire organization

- produce and access information in a real-time environment.

SAP ERP

- Enable a company to support and optimize its processes

- Tie together disparate business functions (integrated business solution)

- Help the organization run smoothly

- Real-time environment

- Scalable and flexible

7. Summary

-Effective and efficent organizational processes are essential to organizational success.

-ES/ERP offers benefits to organizations through integration of business processes.

-SAP ERP is a complex software system.

-So-called 'best practices' are practices that have worked well for some other organizations, but not necessarily be best for the organization contemplating implementing the ES.