Business Process Re-design in Enterprise Systems Projects: Radical and Evolutionary Change

Business Process Re-design is a major component of an Enterprise Systems (ES) implementation. Organizations adopting ES systems face the dilemma of deciding the degree of changes to their existing business process and or changes to the ES package. This paper explores the nature and process of business process re-design efforts of an organization that had successfully implemented an ES packaged solution. This change encountered by the firm is viewed through the lens “Alternate Change Theories” established by Jarvenppa and Stoddard in terms of business process re-design. Results from the in-depth case study challenge the notion Business Process Reengineering (a radical form of change) in the context of ES implementations and also provides evidence as to why the business process re-design in ES implementations cannot be decoupled into two distinct phases i.e. design phase and implementation phase.