Part - I

Introduction

What is BPR?
Business Process Re-engineering is the fundamental rethinking and radical redesign of business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in critical, contemporary measures of performance, such as cost, quality, service & speed. A popular perception about BPR is that it is a means of streamlining the business processes. There exists a fundamental difference between streamlining a business process and re-inventing it.

Streamlining
Streamlining is an exercise, which result in making incremental changes to the current process to increase performance parameters like quality, etc. In the case of re-inventing a process, the existing one is scrapped and a new one is created from scratch with a fresh look. Concepts & ideas from within and outside the industry should be welcomed. Projects are often identified at points along the change continuum - Streamlining to Re-inventing. Many re-engineering efforts, especially those that are combined with the implementation of ERP packages are grouped somewhere in the middle of the continuum. As such the effort may be a combination of solving old problems and creative redesign of selected processes.

ERP
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems integrate primary business applications; all the applications in an ERP suite share a common set of data that is stored in a central database. A typical ERP system provides applications for accounting and controlling, production and materials management, quality management, plant maintenance, sales and distribution, human resources, and project management.

Features of ERP

Some of the major features of ERP and what ERP can do for the business system are as below: -

• ERP facilitates company-wide Integrated Information System covering all functional areas like Manufacturing, Selling and distribution, Payables, Receivables, Inventory, Accounts, Human resources, Purchases etc.

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* Contributed by -
Vivek Gaurav,
Management Class of 2005,
NITIE, Mumbai.