It’s the holiday seasoning and the time of year many of us find ourselves traveling. If your journey is long, you probably have a plan including procuring a map and planning your route. People have an easy time visualizing their destination but don’t understand the pitfalls that lie in the actual journey. Business process management is the roadmap to the destination of a successful ERP software implementation. If you have done any kind of traveling, you probably understand there are several different routes you could take to get to 1 location. Within an ERP implementation there are various levels of business process management to consider as you are installing or upgrading your new system.
Business process management (BPM) is a systematic approach to making an organization’s workflow more effective, more efficient and more capable of adapting to an ever-changing environment. It enables businesses to be more efficient and flexible to change. A business process is an activity or set of activities that will accomplish a specific organizational goal.
There are a variety of approaches within business process management:

• Business Process Improvement (BPI) is a systematic approach to help an organization optimize its underlying processes to achieve more efficient results. In this approach, key processes should be examined within an organization for any that are competitive differentiators. Six Sigma methodologies is a scale often used, especially in manufacturing, to evaluate and improve key business processes. First, organizations identify the current state and primary key performance indicators(KPIs) to measure success. Next, organizations determine and validate the root cause and improve processes to optimize efficiency. Finally, organizations put a plan in place to monitor and check in on the ongoing process and ensure the processes stay on track.
• Business Process Reengineering (BPR) involves the radical redesign of core business processes to achieve dramatic improvements in productivity, cycle times and quality. In Business Process Reengineering, companies start with a blank sheet of paper and rethink existing processes to deliver more value to the customer. It is used when current processes can’t be improved with minor changes but need to be redesigned instead.
• Business Process Optimization (BPO). Business process management (BPM) is a field in operations management that focuses on improving corporate performance by managing and optimizing a company’s business processes. Optimization looks at all of the existing processes within the business and seeks to improve them to reduce the company’s overall cost to produce. You need to ensure you are only maximizing efficient processes because automating inefficient ones, does your company no good.

Most ERP software is customizable and can be used hundreds of different ways. There is no 1 correct way to use ERP software. They are designed to be flexible to allow for organizations to use them exactly how they need to. An organization needs to define their end goal prior to beginning implementation activities. Doing this will save time later in the process and reduce the risk of choosing the wrong configurations. Hence, choosing your route before you leave can ensure you make it to your destination the proper way.
The last thing to consider is you need to communicate your business processes and goals for them with your ERP Consultant or partner. They are ultimately the ones that need to build out your configurations to align with those processes. 2W Tech is a certified Epicor ERP partner and would be happy to help discuss your business processes and how your ERP software can be configured to help you best achieve them.
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