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Guide

erP And the StAndArd, StAndArd BlUePrInt

Designing business processes is difficult, time their processes to meet the blueprint, rather than the other way
consuming, and very expensive. Highly trained experts con- around. Although such process changes are also difficult to
duct seemingly countless interviews with users and domain implement, once the organization has converted to the stan-
experts to determine business requirements. Then even more dard blueprint, they need no longer support a “variation.”
experts join those people, and together this team invests thou- So, from a standpoint of cost, effort, risk, and avoidance
sands of labor hours to design, develop, and implement effec- of future problems, there is a huge incentive for organiza-
tive business processes that meet those requirements. All of tions to adapt to the standard ERP blueprint.
this is a very high-risk activity, prone to failure. And it all must Initially, SAP was the only true ERP vendor, but in the
be done before IS development can even begin. meantime other companies have developed and acquired
ERP vendors such as SAP have invested millions of labor ERP solutions as well. Because of competitive pressure across
hours into the business blueprints that underlie their ERP so- the software industry, all of these products are beginning to
lutions. Those blueprints consist of hundreds or thousands
of different business processes. Examples are processes for
hiring employees, acquiring fixed assets, acquiring consum-
able goods, and custom “one-off” (a unique product with a
unique design) manufacturing, to name just a few.
Additionally, ERP vendors have implemented their busi-
ness processes in hundreds of organizations. In so doing, they
have been forced to customize their standard blueprint for use
in particular industries. For example, SAP has distribution-
business blueprints that are customized for the auto parts
industry, for the electronics industry, and for the aircraft indus-
try. Hundreds of other customized solutions exist as well.
Even better, the ERP vendors have developed software
solutions that fit their business-process blueprints. In theory,
no software development is required at all if the organiza-
tion can adapt to the standard blueprint of the ERP vendor.
As described in this chapter, when an organization im-
plements an ERP solution, it identifies any differences that
exist between its business processes and the standard blue-
print. Then the organization must remove that difference,
which can be done in one of two ways: It changes business
processes to fit the standard blueprint; or the ERP vendor
or a consultant modifies the standard blueprint (and soft-
ware solution that matches that blueprint) to fit the unique
requirements.
In practice, such variations from the standard blueprint
are rare. They are difficult and expensive to implement, and
they require the using organization to maintain the variations
from the standard as new versions of the ERP software are
developed. Consequently, most organizations choose to modify
Sources: Magdalena Kucova/Fotolia
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