Business Process Measurement in Small Enterprises after the Installation of an ERP Software

We report the observation of the first six months of operation after the installation of an ERP software in a group of small Italian enterprises (some dealers of various products and one manufacturer). Before the ERP, no explicit process descriptions existed within the companies: the operations were manually performed, using office automation software or legacy programs that were not process oriented. The new ERP is equipped with a workflow engine, a number of standard processes that should be followed by the users, and a tracking system that logs the main steps of the processes. We use process mining tools to analyze the events logged by the ERP during the sales, the purchases and the manufacture cycles. Our aim is to 1) compare the ideal processes suggested by the ERP with the real paths followed by the users 2) describe the eventual adaptation of these paths, as the users became acquainted with the ERP 3) highlight critical segments in terms of time spent, iterations, etc. 4) compare the processes of different companies that are in similar business areas. The final goal is to get a better understanding of the processes and a rationalization of the operations. It must be stressed that both the ERP and the main tools used are open source, so that the process measurement is affordable even for very small (micro) enterprises.