Promoting Business Process Management Excellence in Russia

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lowing issues in IT:
Long times of business requests processing
Local automation
Data duplication and incoordination
High labor content of development and support of heterogeneous user interfaces
Duplication of functionality in different systems and lots of manual development
Isolation of systems
Lots of point-to-point connections
Analytical information is duplicated, uncoordinated and unstructured
These issues and growing complexity force companies to look for new methods of systems implementation
and IT management.
4.4 Process Approach for IT-solutions design and implementation of ERP
Business-process modeling may reduce considerably the effort and costs of ERP-systems implementation.
ERP implementation should involve the analysis of current business processes and
the chance of reengineering, rather than designing an application system that makes only the
best of bad processes. Due to the fact that business processes are very complex, in many cases
analysis cannot be done directly on the real-world application. Thus, modeling aims at reducing
the complexity of the reality in order to better understand business processes and their required
software support (Scheer & Habermann, 2000).
According to (Scheer & Habermann, 2000), modeling methods, architectures, and tools have
become increasingly popular because they can help to reduce the cost of software implementation
and at the same time increase user acceptance of ERP software solutions. Several modeling
approaches are possible:
Reduce the effort necessary for creating the target concept by leveraging “best practice case”
knowledge available in reference models.
Create a requirements definition by leveraging modeling techniques to detail the description.
Document the system requirements definition by means of conceptual modeling methods, making
the business logic more understandable.
Leverage conceptual models as a starting point for maximum automation of system and configuration
customizing.
Process modeling is a widely-used approach to achieve the required visibility for existing processes
and future process scenarios as part of business process improvement projects. The
intellectual challenges related to process modeling keep many academics entertained and a
plethora of tools, methodologies and educational material in the form of publications and seminars
is available. However, process modeling has also strong opponents. It is criticized for being
over-engineered, time-consuming, costly and without (sufficient) value. Thus, the challenge is to
find the right level of modeling for the underlying purpose (Rosemann, 2006).