Process design: preparation for ERP selection
I helped a vegetable breeding company that is active worldwide at analysing and designing business processes. Goal: to gain insight in the business operations as a stepping stone to the selection of an ERP application.
On the one hand existing processes are documented. On the other hand new processes were elaborated. The different domains - like planning, supply chain management, seed production, seed processing, logistics, sales - are described coherent.
Approach
- Make an inventory of business processes, including requirements
- Process inventory into a consistent whole of responsibilities, process activities and information
- Signal and discuss in workshops the interfaces between processes, including possible gaps in it
- Offering overview and structure
- Inventory of business processes performed by own business analysts
- Processing by external process designer
- Tuning between business analysts, employees and process designer where necessary
Miscellaneous
- BizAgi Process Modeler for first inventory
- Sparx Enterprise Architect for structured recording
- Applied methods: ArchiMate, BPMN, UML
- Integration between ArchiMate, BPMN and UML defined
- Detailed design with regard to quality testing in ORM by using MS Visio and prototyping in MS Excel
Recommendation
"Jacob has assisted Rijk Zwaan in an extensive requirements project. His primary task was to model our business processes, but his effort stretched to advise on several other topics as well. His methodical, yet practical, approach together with broad knowledge about modelling techniques is exactly what we needed in the project.
This, combined with a structured way of planning and organising his work, made that he swiftly noticed gaps and anomalies in our descriptions, which was a key success factor in this part of the project. Above all Jacob is a pleasant person to work with. We will definitely hire him for similar jobs again, and I highly recommend his work."
— Michel van Westen
Application Specialist Logistics, Rijk Zwaan