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According to the traditional approach, BPR & ERP were considered completely isolated. But, they actually turned out to be parallel activities in the sense that the organization should adopt the benefits of ERP solutions right through the BPR exercise. Business Process Re-engineering is a pre-requisite for going ahead with a powerful planning tool, ERP. An in-depth BPR study has to be done before taking up ERP.
BPR brings out deficiencies of the existing system and attempts to maximize productivity through re-structuring and re-organizing the human resources as well as divisions and departments in the organization.

Once the BPR study and analysis is completed, the next task is to evaluate and select a suitable ERP package for implementation. But nowadays, it is misunderstood that automation alone will improve the performance irrespective of the process or system being followed. Generally, people fail to realize that automation of a redundant process is not going to reap any benefits. Without altering or changing the business process, just automation will help you to make mistakes much faster than earlier. That’s what we are trying to achieve by computerizing the business activities without reengineering the process. It is not the job of software companies who provide the so-called "complete solution" in every aspect to see the ineffectiveness of the current system of the organization.

A point that needs to be accentuated is that the onus of a successful implementation lies on the organization rather than the service provider. The service provider plays the role of a facilitator and catalyst. This does not mean that the service provider wants to play on a safe ground. But because of the fact that you are the best judge of your processes and you have evolved a vision for the organization, it’s you who has to lead the change.

In short, conduct a BPR analysis, which includes finding out mistakes with the existing processes and coming out with the solutions to these mistakes, select an appropriate ERP tool, and customize it for the proposed BPR. This is the order that has to be ideally followed by organizations. But as things stand now, it is happening the other way round. Organizations adopt an ERP tool, customize the current processes to the ERP process, and hence, end up achieving a moderate BPR, or lesser profits. The processes need to be reorganized or simply done in the best possible way before doing anything else.

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* Contributed by -
Santhakumar S.,
PGP1 Student,
BIM, Trichy,
Published in KRIYA, February 2006 Issue, the monthly magazine of the institute..