Term Paper On: Business Process Re-engineering (bpr) Essay Example

Business process re- engineering is also known as business process redesign, business transformation, or business process change management. BACKGROUND Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) has been a management concept since the late sass. Its popularity was greatly accelerated by an article published by Hammer in the Harvard Business Review . The BPR strategy propounded by Hammer focused on organization and management changes to bring about Radical business improvements.

Another school of thought championed by Researchers such as Davenport and Pentagram advocated the use of IT as an important business recess enabler leading to significant improvements in Productivity. However, most of the BPR research works in the early and mid-sass were strategic in nature, pioneered largely by the business management gurus from Harvard and MIT and focused mainly on radical organizational changes. Many of these strategic management approaches do not relate the formulation of company strategies to their deployment via the company business processes at the tactical and operational levels.

Over the past five years, Gigantic has been involved in several business processes Reengineering projects in different industrial sectors and with varying scope, Most of which resulted in the selection of appropriate enterprise solutions to support the reengineering processes? OVERVIEW Business process re-engineering (BPR) began as a private sector technique to help organizations fundamentally rethink how they do their work in order to dramatically improve customer service, cut operational costs, and become world-class competitor.

A key stimulus for re-engineering has been the continuing development and deployment of sophisticated information systems and networks. Leading organizations are becoming bolder in using this technology to support innovative equines processes, rather than refining current ways of doing work. [pick] Reengineering guidance

and relationship of Mission and Work Processes to Information Technology. Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) is basically the fundamental re-thinking and radical re-design, made to an organization's existing resources.

It is more than Just business improvising. It is an approach for redesigning Reengineering starts with a high-level assessment of the organization's mission, strategic goals, and customer needs. Basic questions are asked, such as "Does our mission need to be redefined? Are our strategic goals aligned with our mission? Who are our customers? " An organization may find that it is operating on questionable assumptions, particularly in terms of the wants and needs of its customers.

Only after the organization rethinks what it should be doing, does it go on to decide how best to do it. Within the framework of this basic assessment of mission and goals, re-engineering focuses on the organization's business processes?the steps and procedures that govern how resources are used to create products and services that meet the needs of particular customers or markets. As a structured ordering of work steps across mime and place, a business process can be decomposed into specific activities, measured, modeled, and improved.

It can also be completely redesigned or eliminated altogether. Re-engineering identifies, analyzes, and re-designs an organization's core business processes with the aim of achieving dramatic improvements in critical performance measures, such as cost, quality, service, and speed. Re-engineering recognizes that an organization's business processes are usually fragmented into sub processes and tasks that are carried out by several specialized functional areas within the organization.

Often, no one is responsible for he overall performance of the entire process. Re-engineering maintains that optimizing the performance of sub

processes can result in some benefits, but cannot yield dramatic improvements if the process itself is fundamentally inefficient and outmoded. For that reason, re-engineering focuses on re-designing the process as a whole in order to achieve the greatest possible benefits to the organization and their customers.

This drive for realizing dramatic improvements by fundamentally re- thinking how the organization's work should be done distinguishes re-engineering from process improvement efforts that focus on functional or incremental improvement. HISTORY In 1990, Michael Hammer, a former professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published an article in the Harvard Business Review, in which he claimed that the major challenge for managers is to obliterate non-value adding work, rather than using technology for automating it.

This statement implicitly accused managers of having focused on the wrong issues, namely that technology in general, and more specifically information technology, has been used primarily for automating existing processes rather than using it as an enabler for making non-value adding work obsolete. Hammer's claim was simple: Most of the work being done does not add any value for customers, and this work should be removed, not accelerated through automation.

Instead, companies should reconsider their processes in order to maximize customer value, while minimizing the consumption of resources required for delivering their product or service. A a member of the Ernst & Young research center, in a paper published in the Sloan Management Review This idea, to unbiased review a company's business processes, was rapidly adopted by a huge number of firms, which were striving for renewed competitiveness, which hey had lost due to the market entrance of foreign competitors,

their inability to satisfy customer needs, and their insufficient cost structure.

Even well established management thinkers, such as Peter Trucker and Tom Peters, were accepting and advocating BPR as a new tool for (re-)achieving success in a dynamic world. During the following years, a fast growing number of publications, books as well as Journal articles, were dedicated to BPR, and many consulting firms embarked on this trend and developed BPR methods. However, the critics were fast to claim that BPR was a ay to euthanize the work place, increase managerial control, and to Justify downsizing, I. E. Ajar reductions of the work force, and a rebirth of Tailors under a different label. Despite this critique, reengineering was adopted at an accelerating pace and by 1993, as many as 65% of the Fortune 500 companies claimed to either have initiated reengineering efforts, or to have plans to do so . This trend was fueled by the fast adoption of BPR by the consulting industry, but also by the study Made in America conducted by MIT, that showed how companies in many US industries had gagged behind their foreign counterparts in terms of competitiveness, time-to-market and productivity.

DEVELOPMENT AFTER 1995 With the publication of review in 1995 and 1996 by some of the early BPR proponents coupled with abuses and misuses of the concept by others, the reengineering fervor in the U. S. Began to wane. Since then, considering business processes as a starting point for business analysis and redesign has become a widely accepted approach and is a standard part of the change methodology portfolio, but is typically performed in a less radical way as originally

proposed.

More recently, the concept of Business Process Management (BPML) has gained major attention in the corporate world and can be considered as a successor to the BPR wave of the sass, as it is evenly driven by a striving for process efficiency supported by information technology. Equivalently to the critique brought forward against BPR, BPML is now accused of focusing on technology and disregarding the people aspects of change. THE ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY reengineering concept.

It is considered by some as a major enabler for new forms of working and collaborating within an organization and across organizational borders . Early BPR literature identified several so called disruptive technologies that were supposed to challenge traditional wisdom about how work should be performed. 2. Shared databases, making information available at many places 3. Expert systems, allowing generalists to perform specialist tasks 4. Telecommunication networks, allowing organizations to be centralized and decentralized at the same time 5.

Decision-support tools, allowing decision-making to be a part of everybody's Job 6. Wireless data communication and portable computers, allowing field personnel to work office independent 7. Interactive videodisk, to get in immediate contact with potential buyers 8. Automatic identification and tracking, allowing things to tell where they are, instead of requiring to be found 9. High performance computing, allowing on-the-fly planning and provisioning In the mid sass, especially workflow management systems were considered as a significant contributor to improved process efficiency.

Also ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) vendors, such as SAP, JDK Edwards, Oracle, Peoples, positioned their solutions as vehicles for business process redesign and improvement. THE IMPLEMENTATION OF BUSINESS PROCESS REENGINEERING As more organizations undertake business process reengineering (BPR),

issues in implementing BPR projects become a major concern. This field research seeks empirically to explore the problems of implementing reengineering projects and how the severity of these problems relates to BPR project success.

Based on past theories and research related to the implementation of organizational change as well as field experience of reengineering experts, a comprehensive list of sixty-four BPR implementation problems was identified. The severity of each problem was then rated by those who have participated in reengineering in 105 organizations. Analysis of the results clearly demonstrates the central importance of change management in BPR implementation success.

Resolutions of problems in other areas such as technological competence and project planning were also determined to be necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for reengineering success. Further, problems that are more directly related to the conduct of a project such as process delineation, project management, and tactical planning were perceived as less difficult, yet highly such as training personnel for the redesigned process. These findings suggest that reengineering project implementation is complex, involving many factors.

To succeed, it is essential that change be managed and that balanced attention be paid to all identified factors, including those that are more contextual (e. G. , management support and technological competence) as well as factors that pertain directly to the conduct of the project (e. G. , project management and process delineation). As one of the first pieces of empirical evidence based on a field study, this research emphasizes the importance of addressing BPR implementation within the broader context of organizational change in a complex esoterically environment.

REASONS FOR PROCESS REENGINEERING There are several reasons for organizations to reengineering

their business processes: (1) To re-invent the way they do work to satisfy their customers; (2) To be competitive; (3) To cure systemic process and behavioral problems; 4) To enhance their capability to expand to other industries; (5) To accommodate an era of change; (6) To satisfy their customers, employees, and other stakeholders who want them to e dramatically different and/or to produce different results (7) To survive and be successful in the long term; and (8) To invent the "rules of the game. Whatever the reason for reengineering, managers should ask themselves: What do our customers and other stakeholders want/require? How must we change the processes to meet customer and other stakeholder requirements and be more efficient and effective? Once streamlined, should the processes be computerized (I. E. , how can information technology be used to improve quality, cycle time, and other critical baselines)? Processes must be streamlined (I. E. , re-invented) before they are computerized. Otherwise, the processes may produce results faster, but those results may not be the ones needed.