Business Process Assessment/Needs Assessment: What's the Difference?

What's the difference between a business process assessment and a needs assessment? These two terms are not interchangeable. As ERP consultants, they go hand in hand, in usage and in practice.  We at Accounting Systems Consulting Group, LLC define the term “needs assessment” as the preliminary step in which we gather data we regard as the initial intelligence used to determine if a business process assessment will be necessary or valuable. The needs assessment describes the information gathered when a prospective customer expresses interest in replacing their accounting system.  A non-billable engagement, this service is offered by our team to provide a calculable procedure for assessing the requirements of your back office accounting and front office customer facing teams.  The costs of replacing the current system is compared to the potential benefits to our prospective customer once they have changed over to the new system.  The needs assessment is a basic assessment to determine whether or not the prospective customer will benefit from a more detailed business process assessment.

The business process assessment is a process by which tools in the form of questionnaires to each department are used to reveal process improvement opportunities. It is important to conduct such a process prior to selecting a new accounting system. As it will help understand the degree the new system meets the business process automation objectives of each department necessary to improve productivity within a company.  Start  by asking each department a series of questions, each of which is assigned a value so there is a certain amount of weight given to each question answered.  The responses to these questions will reveal "bottlenecks" within a particular department that are hindering the growth and efficiency of the business, and it is through this process that a business process assessment is achieved.

Step One:  The technology project management committee determines which questions apply to each department within the company.  
 
Step Two:  Engage each department in order to get every person involved.  This is achieved by valuing each question based on its overall importance

Step Three:  Analyze the data
 
Step Four:  Matching the objectives  of each department against  the functionality of each accounting system under consideration of the company’s specific needs and goals.  This is calculated by creating a matrix, and depicted for the simple understanding of the business in context of growth.

Contact us to learn more about our complimentary needs assessment evaluation.  Is it time to take your business to the next level?  
 
Accounting Systems Consulting Group, LLC.  - Shreveport, LA