Process Innovation as a Necessary Condition for Successful Implementation of a new Production Planning System.

Information technology is a really necessary requirement for today's business environment. It helps to manage all business processes, enables efficient communication within the whole supply chain and provides important results for driving a company's performance. However, the implementation of a new information technology system is not sufficient for reaching expected results. A lot of other changes are also required in terms of process innovations and people's behaviour. A process innovation itself includes significant changes in process management, techniques, and equipment or software tools. However, the implementation of a new software tool without any other improvements in the relevant processes is not enough to achieve a complete process innovation process innovation. This paper deals with advanced planning systems and the process innovations needed for their successful implementation. The whole research part is based on the study conducted within Czech manufacturing companies that have implemented and used any type of advanced software support for production planning in the last five years. A questionnaire-based investigation was used just to obtain a basic overview of the actual state of this field. However, the most relevant results were reached through the interviews conducted with production managers or planners from selected companies, own experiences, case studies and other personal contacts with respondents. In particular, they were asked about the most significant benefits that were achieved in relation to the new planning software and process innovation that were adopted before finalising the whole implementation process. As the results show, process innovations are not always regarded so seriously during the whole implementation process, which might lead to the failure of the entire implementation. Therefore, the main goal of this paper is to point out the importance of process innovation for the successful implementation of advanced planning systems and to find out how strong the interdependence existing between these two variables is. The outcome of the whole research activity in this field should be some kind of methodology containing important requirements for the successful implementation of advanced production planning systems and all the necessary process innovations that could significantly influence the whole implementation process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]