Assessment of an enterprise-level business system Essay

Assessment of an enterprise-level descent system - Essay ExampleAt the end this write up would set forth the criteria for establishing the acceptableness or otherwise of the business litigate mapping tools and suggest any improved tools. In fact all this considerations lot be answered in the conceit of business transit reengineering.It was in the early 1990s that many US corporations, and subsequently companies all over the world, began to adopt the concept of business process reengineering (BPR) to detect long lost competitiveness that they had lost during the previous decade. The primary feature of BPR is the sole focus on business processes, rather than functional organizational structures. Davenport (1993) defines a (business) process asa structured, measured set of activities designed to produce a specific payoff for a particular customer or market. It implies a strong emphasis on how work is done within an organization, in contrast to a product focuss emphasis on what. A process is therefore a specific ordering of work activities across time and space, with a beginning and an end, and clearly defined inputs and outputs a structure for action. ... Taking a process approach implies adopting the customers point of view. Processes are the structure by which an organization does what is necessary to produce value for its customers.1 Hammer & Champys (1993) definition can be considered as a subset of Davenports. They define a process as a collection of activities that takes one or more kinds of input and creates an output that is of value to the customer. Whereas Johansson et. al. (1993) defines a process as, a set of linked activities that take an input and transform it to create an output. Ideally, the transformation that occurs in the process should add value to the input and create an output that is more useful and effective to the recipient either upstream or downstream. This definitions lead us to chief feature of a business process to wit Defin ability, Order, Customer, Value adding, Embeddedness and Cross functionality. In order to gain an understanding of the various processes involved in the organization which completes its business system information pertaining to above features of the business processes needs to be collected. There can be essentially two approaches to collection of such data-one, the primary data collection and, two, the secondary data collection. With in these approaches primary data could be collected through face to face interviews with key personnel responsible for such processes and a broader based questionnaire approach can be used for the operative employees. Secondary data sources can be rich and can range from industry publications to in-house examination of manuals, sales and marketing registers, financial accounts, accounting vouchers to Board minutes to minutes of the various committees of the Board and other executive committees.2 The process of business process mapping can make up two approaches. Davenport and Short (1990) have identified two basic methods for process identification, which they termed targeted and comprehensive methods. Targeted methods take their starting point in the identification of a comparatively small number of processes being critical to the business, which are