he adoption of ERP systems represents, nowadays,
one of
the
major
symptom
s
of
a
SME
innovation
capability.
The barrier towards ERP adoption is no
t anymore given by the high cost of ERP acquisition
(many low
-
cost ERP systems for SMEs are nowadays commercially available) but due to the costs and
efforts coming from the
BPR
project that needs to be undertaken
by
the given enterprise for aligning its
p
rocesses with those implemented in the
offered
ERP solution. Also, when it comes to an Industry
domain characterized by very small firms, such
as
the
S
outh Italian one
,
it has to be considered that
unique and
specific business process
es
often make the stre
ngth of the small firms
and changing or
removing them could threaten
its survival and flexibility
features.
The
paper presents the results of
a
collaborative
research project
with a
primary Italian ERP manufacturer and vendor
aimed at
develop
ing
a
structur
ed
approach to the design and configuration
of
ERP system
s
for
small enterprises.
The idea
was that it should be the
ERP able to align its processes with those of the enterprise and not
vice
-
versa
.
Such
challenging
goal has been achieved by adopting an
int
egrated
approach which is process oriented
in all of its phases.
The first
phase consists in
design
ing
the
structural ERP model by using
a process
oriented formal language
. This
model consists of
more than 500 IDEF3 diagrams
and
5000 processes.
The second
phase
concern
s
the
ERP
processes implementation and customization
by a configurator
system. This tool allow
s
the
Vendor
-
Customer
system to
easily
configure
the ERP system in accordance
with the customer needs.
The last phase
focuses
on the
process
control
activity and discrete event
simulation
has been proposed as effective tool
for this purpose
.