How BANYAS helps sustaining ERP benefits

Benefits, serving justification for huge investments into ERP system, are

  • Efficiency
  • Integrated Information
  • Reporting
  • Customer Service
  • Security

(for details see ERP benefits)

These anticipated benefits can turn into reality under one condition:

absolute majority of processes must run in a controlled systems’ landscape of ERP (+ MES, LIMS, CRM, etc). It means that any genius applications, like MS Excel, MS Access and e-mail should not be part of the process.

Implementation of the whole system or specific processes starts from learning the use of these not-well-controlled and never properly supported tools and then designing new (hopefully not less intelligent) solutions, to replace these (usually highly complex) applications. This process of migrating custom/user- built applications into a controlled system has enormous change management challenges, involving communicational, political, emotional and adaptation dilemmas.

Putting aside subjective issues, and assuming highly positive attitude towards the change, the two universally challenging tasks are:

  • Agree and work together with extremely experienced people, who wrote these applications originally and believe that nothing can do the job better (usually they are quite right).
  • Ensure all communication aspects are covered in the new solution. For example, controlling changes, made by different departments, sending feedback notifications and highlighting changes might be not obvious at all within a big system.

Finally, after this long, brave and uncompromising struggle the desired result is achieved and most business processes are in our new, well controlled system.

But like the wedding is a happy, but never the end, the real life is just starting. Now we invest millions in the ERP system, keeping huge amount of resources busy with its maintenance and constant enhancement. Having all our processes running through it and all auditors looking into it we get REALLY afraid that something will go differently from how it was defined. We add security and rigidness and make any request for change struggle through enormously complex procedures.

The result is: our users are driven away; they choose to use their private tools. Back to where we started: we lose transparency on very important parts of the process. After all the huge efforts to have our processes managed in the controlled systems, we find ourselves in exactly an opposite state.

But what if our real processes would be transparent?

Then we could provide our experienced users with more access and freedom. We would be able to see what they are doing and how this can be turned into the best practices. The value of our ERP system would be seriously increased and users would feel that the system is becoming the tool for them, instead of commonly known feeling of slavery to the system.

How such transparency could be achieved?

This is the dream, that our Automated Business Scenario Identifier (BANYAS) is determined to make true.

When developing BANYAS we had to find solutions for very interesting questions. For example:

  • How do we trace ALL processes from ALL users around the world all the time without heavy impact on the system performance?
  • If the performance question is answered, then how do we know to link smallest elements of information, generated by the ERP system and caught by our monitoring, into process chains?
  • If we found successful solution for getting the process chains by clever linking of caught elements of information, how can we identify similar parts of these process chains to describe them properly in an understandable manner, group them into bigger and less technical objects, deal with cases of multiple items and clean-up of not-really business flows?
  • Finally, how would we then visualize all that in the way that users will be able to read the identified business flows, analyze, compare and benefit?

Genetics specialists had similar problems and managed to solve them. And so did we.

We trace all happening in the system, inferring actually happening processes, applying immediate comparative analysis to describe the processes in the natural language. Result is a standardized and comprehensive Process Knowledge database with unique possibilities of comparative analysis and universal traceability. Unlike other process-related tools on the market, BANYAS needs no preliminary knowledge. You plug it in and see what is going on in the company.

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