Legacy System Case Study

913 Words2 Pages

Q1:
According to Marianne Bradford, the definition of BPR is "the fundamental, radical redesign in business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in key measures of performance such as cost, quality, speed and service" (Modern ERP, 2nd Edition, 2010, p30). Basically, it is an operational strategy to overhaul core business processes within an organization in an attempt to improve performance and productivity.

For underperforming companies, BPR may be considered as the magic wand to fix problems and achieve performance breakthrough although it doesn’t always turn out that way. They use BPR as a mean of recovery by restructuring existing processes and introducing substantial changes to their day to day operations so that they can reduce cost and increase efficiency and profitability.

Q2:
Redesigning business processes that are integrated with a legacy system poses many challenges due to the scope and complexities of a typical legacy system infrastructure. Most legacy systems lack proper documentation and have layers of data and application redundancy so it’s extremely difficult to change them to align with BRP. Also many companies lack the required technical expertise and budget to replace them. Marianne Bradford states in her book, “Quite often legacy technology, because of the cost, complexity, or risk of change, will ‘trap’ an organization in less than optimal business processes and obsolescent business models” (Modern ERP, 2nd Edition, 2010, p40).

Q3:
1. Lack of management commitment - The top management was not actively involved in the planning, design and deployment of the ERP system. There was no strong commitment from them to force organizational process changes on an enterprise basis and deal with resista...

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... features and evaluate how it would meet the business objectives they set out to achieve.

I would have stayed away from HPT ERP because its built-in processes did not fit with what Vicro wanted to accomplish and Vicro was not prepared to change their business processes to fit HPT, either. It’s evident that implementing HPT onto the company’s existing functions was not going to improve any performance but rather hinder enterprise integration and create more work down the road to support both the old and new systems. Additionally, employees were not involved in the decision process so their opinions were never reflected when choosing HPT. It would’ve been too risky to implement a costly system without input from those who would have to use it every day because it significantly increased the chance of them not embracing the new system and thus making it useless.

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