Bent u klaar voor een op maat gesneden aanpak van ERP op Salesforce Lightning?

Uitgebreide ERP-suites maken herhaaldelijk de verwachtingen niet waar en leiden tot enorme kostenoverschrijdingen en teleurstellingen.

Veel bedrijven zijn daarom terughoudend in het starten van hun tweede-generatie (of derde) ERP-project en blijven worstelen met hun legacy-omgeving. Implementatie van ERP komt, bijna altijd, neer op "projecten beperkt door technologie". Terwijl bedrijven alleen hun bedrijfsprocessen, informatiehuishouding en interacties met upstream- en downstream ketenpartners willen automatiseren.

Tegenwoordig zoeken bedrijven naar alternatieve wendbare benaderingen om hun landschap van bedrijfsinformatiesystemen vorm te geven.

Een dergelijke aanpak is de best-of-breed.

Echter, een on-premise best-of-breed-aanpak is geen haalbare optie. Het vereist een sterk integratieplatform en een grote mate van openheid van de betrokken applicaties.

Integratie-in-de-Cloud, daarentegen, is een stuk eenvoudiger. Een best-of-breed aanpak met oplossingen beschikbaar op het Force.com platform kan soepel en vlot ingericht worden.

Sommige reeds operationele best-of-breed combinaties zijn: Rootstock - FinancialForce en PropelPLM / Rootstock en SalesForce CRM.

Ik denk dat de ‘klant-tot-klant’ processen van menig productiebedrijf gemakkelijk kunnen worden geautomatiseerd met een best-of-breed aanpak. Best-of-breed wordt dan een gewone configuratie activiteit zoals het configureren van een fiets met behulp van de beste componenten die beschikbaar zijn.

Bekijk de oplossingen in het verloop van het bedrijfsproces hierna:

Klik hier om het verloop van het bedrijfsproces te bekijken op SlideShare.

[Begin Update: Oktober 2018]

De laatste tijd heb ik Archimate gebruikt voor het modelleren en beschrijven van bestaande en toekomstige Proces- en Applicatielandschappen. Zie Archimate plaatje hieronder hoe het hierboven beschreven proces eruit ziet:

[Einde Update: Oktober 2018]

Het ultieme ERP gevoel is 'ERP op maat'.

Als u mijn berichten over de innovatie van uw ERP gelezen heeft, de best-of-breed aanpak past in de stappen Sub-Project Selecteren en Contracteren. Geleidelijk in de tijd worden alle onderdelen die nodig zijn om uw bedrijf te ondersteunen geïntegreerd en geïmplementeerd.

"Neem de innovatie van uw ERP-systeem zelf in handen!"

"Welke aanpak volgt u voor de innovatie van uw ERP?"

Mijn aandachtsgebieden zijn bedrijfsprocessen, bedrijfsinformatiesystemen (ERP, CRM. BPM, ...), integratie van bedrijfsprocessen en systemen over de grenzen van bedrijven EN niet te vergeten Open Source bedrijfsapplicaties.

Als u een mening of visie hebt over de invoering of het gebruik van ERP in de Cloud aarzel dan niet om deze hier kenbaar te maken. Als u zich kunt vinden in het artikel of de herkenning groot is dan deel het met anderen.

Tags: ERP, Cloud, BPM, Rootstock, Salesforce, Propel PLM, DSDM

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Running O2C / P2P in and with SAP or any other ERP

With the growing interest in sustainability, future-robustness and maneuverability buyers and sellers demand their business partners to increase collaboration, to become more agile and to contribute heavily in sharing data electronically. They see real benefits in automating their interactions with business partners.

But although gains can be huge they do not come without a cost. So business partners are often very reluctant to jumping on this bandwagon. Moreover gains not always come in hard dollars but often manifest themselves in different ways - stronger bond with customers or suppliers - improved and aligned business processes - higher customer service. Business partners however not always see these gains to their advantage since they are more concerned about the costs of implementation.

People / businesses often think establishing electronic data sharing and process collaboration is difficult to accomplish / requires much customization effort. A few years ago that was fully true but today we see that many ERP systems provide support out of the box.

Some ERP systems provided that already for years - for example SAP, QAD, ... - If you are using SAP you have a wealth of functionality at your fingertips to make it work smoothly.

There is a lot of documentation available online to get it done without years of experience in SAP. At least I learned to work and configure SAP without training - just in depth knowledge of business processes and occasionally some help is sufficient.

But something you can not learn is what you want or need (business-wise) and how you want it. And as with everything in business, things do not happing overnight. You cannot go to the grocery and buy a cup of O2C or P2P and then poor it out over your Supply Chain.

However with the right approach, the right people on board and willingness / commitment of your own organization and business partners will get it up and running in a few months.

BUT ONLY when you have your data and processes aligned with proven business practices.

Data alignment

Data alignment is about talking the same language as your business partners. Ensure your products, your locations, your delivery and payment conditions are understood.

SAP provides a lot of ways to set up cross references with your internal language and the language of your business partners such as translation of partner address codes and products. Even without customization most of the data provided in electronic documents can be stored for replication later in the process.

I dealt with complex data requirements of large wholesalers and retailers without having to build new forms or extend tables. OK Yes! some user exits - hooks into the standard SAP functionality - had to be used to change the behavior slightly.

But a lot (you) can (do) be done by adopting GS1 Global Location Numbers (GLN) or D&B D‑U‑N‑S Number, and GS1 Global Trade Item Number (GTIN) - the EAN codes or Universal Product Code (UPC). And also implement standardized delivery terms (Incoterms) and payment terms.

Supporting product data classification - on the other hand - is still a major issue. The classification system of SAP is not equiped for handling the product data models of UNSPSC, ETIM, GS1 GPC. Manual setup is unfeasible due to the increased changeability of these models. That is where others tools are really needed to complement SAP.

Process alignment

How difficult can it be to align processes! There are a lot of reference models available for different industries:

SCOR Framework APQC's Process Classification Framework®(PCF) Business Process Framework (eTOM)

But yes, these are too generic! And we may not forget that each company has unique characteristics. That is why there is a lot to do before you are able to use these reference models.

What about simple models? Like these for goods and services processes.

Here you see the documents that are exchanged between buyers and sellers as well as the internal activities that happen to process or generate these documents. And for product manufacturers you see we talk about deliveries. While for companies delivering services it can be a combination of both models.

Now aligning business processes is not something you do inhouse. It requires sitting together with your business partners and go through all the scenario's you share. Then put them all in a decent process modeling tool, herewith generating already a part of the documentation for future use. Thereafter decide together which processes are good candidates to start with.

See for example: the quote-to-cash process of a bike manufacturer.

Or the process of an OEM manufacturer:

Common sense is the most important aspect here, you do not have to be an architect or IT specialist. You just have to talk business! That is difficult enough.

But apart from using standard SAP functionality, is there another way?

There are integration tools out there that can act as intelligent buffer for the outside world and your internal environment. Model-driven tools that not only help you collaborate with your business partners but also enable you to build some small extensions to your SAP system.

These tools help businesses that unfortunately or luckily do not have SAP but some other ERP.

See my post: Integration essential for online retailers

Let me know if you are intested in learning more about how you can establish business-to-business collaboration with your partners.

Tags: EDI, ERP, PEPPOL, SAP, e-Procurement, e-Invoicing, e-Ordering

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MAKE LIFE at work MORE ENJOYABLE for the knowledge worker of TODAY

"To muse is to consider something thoughtfully"

business processes in the eyes of leaders

short-term / near-term horizon

Leaders 'often' care too much about short-term profits / gains.

As such they omit factors that only affect the long-term viability of the company.

denial and ignorance

Leaders 'often' deny the lack of maturity of their business processes and information householding OR have adopted a narrow, isolated view of their business ignoring all kind of external and internal inter-dependencies.

unbelievable confidence

Leaders 'often' believe their carefully chosen business application suites are able to support the whole organization.

Now it is time to look at things differently

We need to take a different view at business applications!

Today complexity of changes in business environments increases by the month and business application users are dealing with a growing diversity of critical opportunities, challenges and problems in their daily life. They have become real knowledge workers no longer talking to customers only about sales orders but also managing quotation requests, product catalog distribution and handling disputes, and much more.

In future years this will get worse because we will have fully automated standard tasks - such as creating sales orders and issuing invoices.

But our highly praised business applications are still task driven / oriented - there is a menu option for each activity to be executed. Well yes they are no longer running on premise but in the cloud, and yes they are accessible at any time, at any place with any device.

However our knowledge worker is no longer task-oriented but goal-oriented. He or she handles business complaints - validates whether they are justified - and at the same time ensures new products are shipped to customers with the highest urgency or goods returned to suppliers for replacement. Meanwhile answering questions over the phone or via chat coming from prospects, customers, suppliers or sales people in the field. Yes, the future knowledge worker no longer deals with the whole organization but with the whole supply chain - all internal and external stakeholders.

Work can no longer be done in a functional task oriented manner. The knowledge worker needs context-driven and goal-oriented access to prescribed business processes. Moreover the knowledge worker wants to be able to adjust ways of workings or approaches based on knowledge gained while doing the work. And wants to be able to reuse this knowledge.

When dealing with a request of a customer the knowledge worker wants, instead of executing a predefined business process, to choose which prescribed business process to execute based on the status of information at hand supported by decisions made in similar situations.

I am modeling the work of a future knowledge worker combining BPMN, CMMN, DMN and integrating this with business applications.

We need to take a different view at business processes!

We deal no longer with structured business processes but work will become unstructured for the greater part with lots of decisions and process variants.

As it looks to me now, our current business information systems / applications (just to name a few: ERP, CRM, PLM, ...) in their current fashion will no longer be suitable / capable to support the knowledge worker. I doubt whether with the growing diversity they can still support the business.

So we need a combination of process management and decision management controlled no longer by the process control flow but by context - cases and it need to integrate with all kind of devices and application systems of business partners. And it need to be adaptive - extensible on the spot by generating new functionality or integrating it with existing solutions in the cloud.

What we need is the intuitive way of working / the human logic in the head of some knowledge workers that already today deal with so many business information systems such as ERP, CRM, SRM, B2B platforms to get their job done.

What we want is MAKE LIFE at work MORE ENJOYABLE for the knowledge worker of the future.

Tags: BPM, BPMN, DMN, Process Modeling, ACM

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Should business processes on the shovel for BPM?

Why do companies not see the opportunities? Are they too busy with other things? Or are they blind to the blind spots?

Are your business processes well organized or is there still room for improvement. Gaining insight gives each company more grip and opportunities to grow. A welcome gift for which little needs to be done and up for grabs. Mapping business processes, documenting, sharing and discussing with each other – NOTHING MORE.

Is mapping of processes at your company also not high on the agenda?

Are you like so many other managers and staff not seeing the opportunities and possibilities?

Take a look around you, look at those processes which you for years believe are optimally organized: what data is required or generated in each activity, where does this data come from and for what purpose is it used, who owns this data and what if it is not present, can activities live without this data, where and how is this data logged , how do we share this data with stakeholders (employees, customers, suppliers, third parties, ...), ...

Clear?

Business processes are about more than activities and people. It is the combination of steps and sequence (control flow), data and resources (people/information systems/partners in crime).

Did you consider this combination when looking at your processes! Did you see that some processes require data that is stored in several information systems (or nowhere – only in our heads) and where they need to be enriched? Have you seen who wants to edit this data and/or consult? Have you seen what can go wrong (or already did) when this data – at the time it becomes information – is not available or incomplete/incorrect?

Why is that so? Everyone will point the finger to the business process – the steps to convert input into output. Please note output is what it's about when we talk about "what processes add value for the customer?".

Two easy steps (yes, also a process) already help to improve your "business values" (corporate values and business interests) without taking your business processes on the shovel. These steps have everything to do with understanding these business processes and how they contribute to the realization of your business objectives and the expectations of your customers.

Process Discovery

● Awareness leads to Improved Efficiency

why! Each process (in scope) is examined and modeled (AS-IS) which immediately reveals waste or inefficiencies – redundant work / poor hand-overs.

● Awareness leads to Accelerated Effectiveness

why! AS-IS process models reveal the relation between data, resources and events which allows for making better decisions and faster handling of exceptions.

● Awareness leads to Improved Agility

why! AS-IS process models reveal all existing and related processes which allows for executives and staff to find the best process for the task ahead.

Process Analysis

● Insight leads to Improved Efficiency

why! Exploring processes reveals the real pains and presents ways to resolve bottlenecks.

● Insight leads to Accelerated Effectiveness

why! Discussing issues and weaknesses reveals how work can be done by the right person with the right data at the right time.

If I may give some advice - not that I do better, looking at my situation - but still "Just take some distance from how things run today and check if they can be done differently. If needed, go visit fellow companies or join the association of companies in your area. Do not stick stubbornly to the old, but give innovation a chance."

Also look at my presentation: "Business Process Modeling and Automation - Food for Thoughts".

Tags: BPM, BPMN, DMN, Process Modeling

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Moeten bedrijfsprocessen op de schop voor BPM?

Waarom zien bedrijven de kansen niet? Zijn ze te druk met andere dingen! Of zijn ze blind voor de blinde vlekken!

Zijn uw bedrijfsprocessen goed georganiseerd of is er nog ruimte voor verbetering. Verwerven van inzicht geeft elk bedrijf meer grip en kansen om te groeien. Een welkom geschenk waarvoor men weinig hoeft te doen en zomaar voor het grijpen ligt. Bedrijfsprocessen in kaart brengen, documenteren, delen en bespreken met elkaar - MEER NIET.

Staat het in kaart brengen van processen ook in uw bedrijf niet hoog op de agenda?

Ziet u net als zoveel andere verantwoordelijken en uitvoerenden de kansen en mogelijkheden niet?

Kijk dan eens om u heen, kijk naar die processen waarvan u al jaren denkt dat deze optimaal zijn georganiseerd: welke gegevens worden in elke activiteit gevraagd of gegenereerd, waar komen deze gegevens vandaan en waarvoor worden deze gebruikt, wie bezit deze gegevens en wat als ze niet aanwezig zijn, kunnen activiteiten zonder deze gegevens, waar en hoe worden deze gegevens vastgelegd, hoe delen we deze met belanghebbenden (medewerkers, klanten, leveranciers, derden, ...) , ...

Duidelijk?

Bedrijfsprocessen gaan over meer dan handelingen / activiteiten en mensen. Het is de combinatie van stappen en volgorde (control flow), gegevens (data) en mensen/middelen (resources/information systems/partners in crime).

Heeft u deze combinatie meegenomen wanneer u naar uw processen keek! Heeft u ook gezien dat sommige processen gegevens vragen die in meer informatiesystemen (of nergens - alleen in onze hoofden) liggen opgeslagen en daar weer verrijkt moeten worden? Heeft u gezien wie allemaal die gegevens wil bewerken en/of raadplegen? Heeft u gezien wat fout kan gaan (of reeds gaat) wanneer deze gegevens - op het moment dat ze informatie wordt - niet beschikbaar zijn of onvolledig / onjuist zijn?

Hoe komt dat zo? Iedereen zal met de vinger wijzen naar het bedrijfsproces - dat zijn de stappen die moeten worden doorlopen om input om te zetten in output. Let wel output is waar het over gaat wanneer we hebben over "welke processen voegen waarde toe voor de klant?".

Twee eenvoudige stappen (ja, ook dit is een proces) helpen reeds om uw "business values" (bedrijfswaarden en bedrijfsbelangen) te verbeteren zonder dat uw bedrijfsprocessen op de schop moeten. Deze stappen hebben alles te maken met het verkrijgen van inzicht in deze bedrijfsprocessen en hoe deze bijdragen tot de realisatie van uw bedrijfsdoelstellingen en de verwachtingen van uw klanten.

Process Discovery - Ontdekken van processen

● Awareness leads to Improved Efficiency

waarom! Elk bedrijfsproces (in scope) wordt onderzocht en gemodelleerd (AS-IS) waardoor onmiddellijk verspillingen - overbodig werk, poor hand-overs - zichtbaar worden.

● Awareness leads to Accelerated Effectiveness

waarom! AS-IS procesmodellen onthullen de relaties tussen gegevens, mensen of systemen, en gebeurtenissen of activiteiten waardoor onmiddellijk mogelijkheden ontstaan voor het nemen van betere besluiten en het sneller afhandelen van uitzonderingen.

● Awareness leads to Improved Agility

waarom! AS-IS procesmodellen onthullen alle bestaande en aan elkaar gerelateerde processen waardoor beslisnemers en uitvoerenden het beste bestaande proces kunnen vinden voor de uit te voeren taak.

Process Analysis - Doorgronden van processen

● Insight leads to Improved Efficiency

waarom! Verkennen en doorgronden van processen onthult de werkelijke pijnpunten en presenteert benaderingen voor het oplossen van de knelpunten.

● Insight leads to Accelerated Effectiveness

waarom! Bespreken van de problemen en zwakke punten onthult hoe werk anders gedaan kan worden door andere mensen met gebruik van de juiste gegevens en op het juiste moment.

Als ik een advies mag geven - niet dat ik het beter doe, kijkende naar mijn situatie - maar toch "Neem eens afstand van hoe dingen al jaren lopen en kijk eens of het anders kan. Ga desnoods op bezoek bij collega bedrijven of sluit u aan bij de vereniging van bedrijven in uw regio. Blijf vooral niet hardnekkig vasthouden aan het bestaande, maar geef vernieuwing een kans."

Kijk ook eens naar mijn presentatie: "Business Process Modeling and Automation - Food for Thoughts".

Tags: BPM, BPMN, DMN, Process Modeling

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