Some best practices are good enough and become common practices … other best practices are not good enough and require own pract

I remember when I was a student at the university I heard for the first time about “good practices”. The principle idea behind good practices was that certain “ways of doing” got accepted as being good, or even being the reference. Instead of re-inventing everything one selves, it was allowed for organization to “copy” what was considered good practices. Exchanging on how to do business, on how to run certain processes, on the flow of activities … helped companies to increase efficiency and allowed to gain speed on changing towards/or implementing new practices. SAP (and also other business application software providers) used the concept of good practices to offer standard solutions that were built around these practices. SAP called these standardized processes/flows/models even “best practices” and helped organizations to accelerate in implementing these. Considering the evolution since the early 90’s, good practices (or even best practices) are still very relevant. The waves of Business Process Re-engineering/Modeling/Improving … have enforced the idea of reference based practices and processes. One could say that some “good practices” have become common practices. Meaning that it is a common business, or a generally accepted business practice, to do things in a certain way. And hence to standardize operations accordingly. The result is also that companies see clearly that there is no need to do these practices themselves any longer. They are common, and non-core, and hence ready to outsource or out-task. If you just think about pay-roll processing, facility management (cleaning, catering, fleet management…). The list of “common” practices is actually longer in certain industries (eg. procure-to-pay, warehousing, …) … although these are in more cases still considered “differentiating” from competitors or peers. On the other side of the spectrum, companies try to “innovate”. Not only by developing new products or services, but through creativity in processes (Business Process Innovations). The main idea is to differentiate through an different “practice”. We could say that organization opt for “own practices” which support to build competitive advantage. Own processes are most of the time not “rocket science” but rather “variations” on practices or processes. These own processes are most of the time “rewired” processes, using existing building blocks, or merely changing certain aspects of a good/best practice. It is clear that in many organizations “best practices” have to live together with “own practices”. The question is: is your IT infrastructure and organization capable of supporting this at an acceptable cost of ownership? Equally important is to question the flexibility and speed of changing practices. Undoubtedly a business process platform, which deliver both standard practices and an environment with tools to easily compose own practices based on proven building block/services is the best option. And guess what … SAP can help you here.