Business Software as a Facilitator for Business Process Excellence: Experiences from Case Studies

Software vendors claim in their marketing brochures that business processes and interoperability can be optimised through the use of business software. Business literature emphasizes the various benefits companies can gain from the targeted use of IT systems. Academic literature has, however, paid scant attention to the relationship between business process excellence and the use of ERP systems. Interoperability and business process excellence resulting from it are in the foreground of the following analysis of fourteen business software projects, examined within the eXperience framework in 2006. Hardly surprising was the insight that, in all the selected companies, central performance processes were identified as ‘Excellence Processes’. Interoperability was, in this context, often crucial to the company’s success. In some companies hybrid solutions were implemented, in which the relationship between human being and machine was optimized and a one-hundred-percent technology support was not necessarily pursued as an ideal.