Enterprise Resource Planning

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1.1 OVERVIEW OF ERP AND BPR

The economic globalization has formulated new conditions in the market place. These conditions have given rise to instability and intensive competition in the business environment. There are various factors with respect to which competition in the market has an incremental growth and these factors include price, quality and selection, service and promptness of delivery. The competition has intensified more by the increasing cooperation between various countries world-wide, removal of the barriers and technological innovations. The need for organizational transformations has resulted from these changes, which further leads to the change of the entire processes and organization climate and organization structure. Such a change is characterised by an emerging Information technology, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). ERP system are responsible for integrating the business processes of an organization, and helps them to obtain the competitive advantages which may include enhancing productivity, customer demands satisfaction, increasing the rapid response capabilities of the customers, reduction of the cycle time, enhancing flow efficiency, and rapid generation of financial information [2]. ERP systems help in enabling the managers to control the whole business and accelerate decision making. In what way, does the top management find the need of ERP implementation and whether the top management takes ERP implementation as simple automation of the existing system or something else are the major issues with regard to ERP implementation. The implementation of ERP is not simply considered the automation of existing business processes, as it requires various changes in these business processes of the enterprise to implement the best practices possible [4]. But there are some challenges that ERP implementations have to face such as the ERP system implentations are very complex in nature, moreover, they incur very high costs and problems during and post implementation are not rare in ERPs. So, these issues force a number of organizations in the industry to reconsider their new plans in relation to this enterprise system and ERP implementation. In ERP implementation, the systems are developed and designed so that they can be used to support the organization’s business processes, thus ERP implementation and business process should have close connections.

Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is a process that involves the adoption of process perspectives on a business, and represents a fundamental rethinking of organizations. BPR can be well defined as the fundamental rethinking as well as radical redesign of the business processes with the aim to achieve the an outstanding refinement of measures of performance, such as cost, quality, flexibility, accuracy, service and speed [5].

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