Earlier days the customer used to develop a in-house application according to their requirement. So, different department of the company used to have different stand alone application. The presence of multiple systems requires duplicate data entry which can cause of errors and loss of productivity.
Now when the needs came to have some common information they used to interface the systems with each other on need basis resulting a spider. There may be lot of processing and reporting that is not supported by the in-house systems and is therefore executed off-line through use of office tools. Also there is no central data and maintaining those systems and so many interfaces is a nightmare.
In order to scale the business to the levels required by the Company business plans, while at the same time providing acceptable levels of Customer Service would require putting in place a new system/implementing a new product that has the ability to scale up, yet provide the flexibility required by the business.
So the need came to implement some product/industry solution (SAP ECC, ISU, AFL). Now most of the times we give more focus on product than process. The key success of implementing the solution lies on understanding the process/objective of the customer clearly.
AS-IS: So at first we need to capture the AS-IS process very clearly. First identify the stakeholders/business process owners, try to breakdown the whole system into some major process according to the business. Then drill down each process into lower level sub-process. Then try to capture the requirement/As-Is functionality of each lower level process. Identify the actors, data inputs and KPI's for each process.
Process Optimization: We need to identify the process which are performed by the system and the process which are done manually. Also there could be many duplicate processes, many processes which are not required. Try to apply some process optimization methodology, need to do the optimization after eliminating the waste. Also we will be able to quantify which process is taking how much time and where to improve.
TO-BE: Now from the outcome of the above process along with the customer’s wish list we will be able to come up with the TO-BE processes. Now we can think about the product/solution, try to map the process with the product standard functionality, the outcome will be the GAPs. Then the processes needs to be prioritized and could be implemented in different release.
