Process-powered ERP transformation

Process-powered ERP transformation

With innovations like Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI), technology is evolving at a rapid pace and compelling businesses to evolve to remain competitive and profitable. Therefore, it is becoming increasingly important for organizations to create a strong foundational ERP system with unified processes, an inter-operable technology architecture, and a knowledge base for its employees.

Modernizing ERP systems involves multi-year organizational change management, high costs, and significant time. Often, these initiatives are supported by a business case with a targeted set of objectives and performance improvement goals to drive higher revenues, reduce costs, and improve profitability. Whether it’s to replace a legacy ERP system, migrate to cloud, or revamp applications for operational efficiency, strategic thinking about business processes is a critical success factor.

A successful ERP transformation requires involvement from functional and technical leaders. It’s difficult to design an ERP system to accommodate every business nuance, so it is essential for leadership to understand the most commonly executed process steps to inform trade-off decisions during the ERP design phase.

Deloitte’s Process Bionics and Digital Solutions offering can help with the most commonly executed steps across critical processes to help leaders make better decisions. Process Bionics leverages next-gen process modeling and mining capabilities to harmonize technology and business objectives and enable tracking and monitoring of ERP benefits and sustained ROI.

When the impact of business processes on ERP systems isn’t thoroughly assessed, it can be difficult to achieve the expected ROI. And, with multi-million-dollar investments on the line, that can result in unstandardized processes, unwieldy system customizations, and cost overruns. Using Process Bionics, however, organizations can gain transparency into processes, identify inefficiencies, and produce specific process improvements to help deliver a successful ERP solution.

A differentiated approach to ERP transformation

By leveraging the power of Process Bionics, organizations can streamline ERP transformation efforts in multiple ways.

1. Defining and proving the business case. Leading with business process transformation at the start of an ERP journey de-risks implementation while identifying immediate must-have capabilities and “no regret” business opportunities. Data-driven process mining helps quantify the potential value of system enhancements and measure current process health to identify bottlenecks and their solutions.
2. Process powered system design. By performing next-gen process modeling and mining for critical processes, organizations can visualize process dependencies, understand process pain points, and expedite business requirements to aid in adopting standardized processes in the new ERP system. Examining processes early and establishing benchmarks for outcomes can also save time and money aligned to expected outcomes.
3. De-risking the transformation journey. Identifying process dependencies that have an impact on the decision-making process during the lifecycle of the ERP journey can help avoid cost and time overruns. Process Bionics leverages data-driven analytics to help de-risk business transformation by providing process transparency that supports better decision-making to avoid costly mistakes down the road and deliver higher value and impact.
4. Accelerating value realization. Post-ERP implementation, Process Bionics can help measure the impact and value captured from ERP transformation efforts by measuring critical KPIs and success metrics, pre- and post-implementation, to benchmark process performance and quantify ROI. Further, continuous monitoring of process health can help achieve and sustain expected outcomes.

Business process transformation is the backbone of a successful ERP implementation

In an ERP implementation, technology is only part of the equation. Business process transformation is the real backbone of an ERP implementation. Integrating process transformation into the ERP implementation journey can reduce risk by helping organizations understand current-state constraints, accelerate requirements via cross-functional future-state design, and quantify the impact and value generated from the transformation.

Process Bionics also enables organizations to create an ERP architecture that allows effective interaction with natural and large language models to combine the organization’s data assets (structured and unstructured) to enable innovation using Gen AI capabilities to drive tangible transformational change, and a new generation of technology innovation and modernization.