This is my first post in SDN/BPX, and I was afraid to write on something that you already heard of, or something that is already discussed in the community. But as this is my working experience, and I think the knowledge comes trough experience, I’m going to talk about global roll out projects and the processes re-engineering. When we work on global rollout projects, one of the most important issues is to try as much as possible to standardize the core business processes. This will lead our customers to a long term cost reduction based on process efficiency and will facilitate future improvements in the so called "model". My present experience goes through this global model implementation in one of the world leading wood panels production industry ‘Sonae Industria’ based on SAP Mills solution, APO and SFC (Shop floor control) A perfect model defined, based on the core production and sales processes should’ve been implemented in all factories around the world. A complete business redesign was made in order to fit the presented model – a perfect combination of system changes and business process redesign. In reality when implementing the business model in the local plants, we’ve got to the conclusion that the business model defined only covered 15% to 20% of the local business needs or that the system processes didn’t fit at all the business model – decision by the customer – to develop custom solutions in order to make it fit perfectly to the business process – forgetting the basic principles of this kind of implementation – defined processes with initial requirements – efficiency of the business process and ‘usability’ When implementing a model where the exceptions and the local needs represents 75% of the processes to be implemented, the "model" starts to ‘die’ and the chaos is installed.
The best practices of this industry tell us that the core business model should cover at least 80% of the total of the processes implemented. IT management must do an accurate evaluation of implementing the local specific processes vs. changing the business model and therefore the initial objective – efficiency and cost reduction.
I will go in further details and specific examples of this kind of errors, mostly driven by cost issues.
