Vicro Failure at BPR and ERP
What is BPR? In a plain language, what does it mean to an organization that is underperforming?
Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) are a series of processes, systems and techniques for increasing the efficiency and profitable performance of businesses by re-architecting their workflows (Hammer, 2001). BPR for an underperforming organization is specifically designed to provide a pathway out of the inefficiencies and lack of internal communication and collaboration that over time degrade the operational and financial performance of an enterprise (Hammer, Haney, Wester, Ciccone, Gaffney, 2007).
Why can IT be one of the biggest obstacles for BPR?
Information Technologies (IT) often unnecessarily complicate the process of redefining and re-engineering processes by forcing organizations to change how they do business to just fit into an IT-supported framework (Tsai, Chen, Hwang, Hsu, 2010). IT can become more of a constraint than an enabler of organizational change quickly given its lack of agility and flexibility in supporting...
This is exactly what happened at Vicro from a systems-based standpoint. The greatest factor of the Vicro failure however was the lack of change management planning that was put into place before the systems were installed (Khosrow-Pour, 2003).
What went wrong with the ERP implementation? Note four (4) major issues.
There were many factors that contributed to the ERP implementation at Vicro failing, with the greatest being the lack of planning for change management programs to overcome resistance to change and fear of what the system would do to people's jobs and stability in the company (Khosrow-Pour, 2003). This is often the most critical success factor for any ERP system, yet the management and system integration teams completely missed this aspect of developing their implementation plan. The system integration teams did not ask for any feedback from the employees most affected by the systems being installed, virtually guaranteeing these shifts in how people did their jobs would fail over time (Khosrow-Pour, 2003). A second major…
