1- Our Business Planning Process

The scope of services  involves developing a Business plan  to establish a new business , or reposition a current business for maximum effectiveness.

The Business Plan is basically structured as follows :

This Business Plan can be extended to include a detailed Internal Process Engineering, or Re-engineering to secure effective operations, in harmony with the business plan.

2- Align the IT and the Business-Process-Management:

Our methodology is based on the very true fact that :
“ IT does not represent a value, unless it is aligned to the business objectives and problems”

The IT is a way to manage the organization more effectively. It is a structure that connect all the standard processes to operate in a synchronized way. For this reason , our methodology to assess and propose recommendations is Business-driven ( a top down approach based on the unified structure given in Fig.2). The conventional workflow and data transactions is the lowest level. Automating the data transactions is not an objective in its self. It is the service component to realize the higher level of business functions and processes.

We have successfully implemented this methodology in projects addressing the systems of ERP, EAM, CRM, and SCM.

In what follows we shortly describe the methodology with reference to the case of the ERP systems.

We first start with identifying a best-practice process model for the value -added-business-processes. In the case of the ERP the model of Fig.1 is applied. Short definitions of these processes are given in table-1.

Fig.1-The interaction of the ERP Business Processes

The definitions of the above processes, are shown in table-1.

Table-1

Business Planning	The process of identifying the annual target sales volume and roughly validate the resources capability (production capacity ,material ,labor ,Cash)
MPS	The process to generate the Master Production Schedule
MRP	The process of material planning and management
POP	The purchase order processing
SOP	The sales orders processing, with emphasis on remote sales orders
Shop floor Feedback and control	The process of generating feedback data from the shop floor to the planning ,production ,sales ,purchasing and accounting entities
Lot Tracing	The process of tracing the origin of the material used in the manufacturing
Product Quality Plan	The process of planning for product metrics, according to the planning process
B2C	The process of getting customer accessible to their orders information through the Internet, and fulfill payment on the internet
B2B	The process of performing the purchasing transaction on the Internet and fulfill payment on the internet

Fig.2- Our Integrated Stuctured Model used in the Assessment and the Requirement Specifications

Reference Fig.2, the top two levels are the internationally recognized ERP best practice processes , functions and sub-functions( www.ap+ics.org ,and our site www.isg-egypt.com.eg ) . The value added ERP business processes are:
1- Business Planning
2- Master Production Schedule (MPS)
3- Material Requirements Planning (MRP)
4- Purchase Order Processing (POP)
5- Sales Order Processing (SOP)
6- Lot Tracing
7- Shop Floor Feedback
8- Product Quality Planning
For more information on the functions and sub-Functions , please refer to our web site
http://www.isg-egypt.com.eg/Functions%20dictionaryrelease.htm

Two other Processes , related to the use of the Internet, are added for near future consideration in Egypt ( Year-2007 –after the effective application of the “Electronic Signature Law” in Egypt by ITIDA).

We have applied this approach successfully in 70 sites over the last 15 years.

In the last 10 years , the role of standards is greatly emphasized as a result of the globalization .For this reason we emphasize the role of the international standards in our methodology. This will secure scalability and sustainability for the beneficiary. Examples of the source of standards we use are:

www.apics.org
www.ieee.org
www.itgi.org
www.Rosettanet.org
http://www.openapplications.org
www.ebXML.org

Finally, in our Methodology we differentiate between the SMEs and the large Enterprises.
The SMEs are characterized by :
1. Total number of employees is less than 150 persons
2. Usually they have one manufacturing site. However, they can have multi-sales branches.
3. Each key-person can have more than one function
4. The ERP system should preserve the resilience . The resilience in doing business is a differential advantage for the SMEs.
The ERP is focused mainly on improving the capability of the owner, and may be other few key persons , to control the Business . On the other hand, with large enterprises there is large layer of middle managers and distributed manufacturing sites and may have high interest to move into the e.business